Disassembling the Education Cat

       I apologize in advance.
       Not just because I'm married. (As a stand-up comedian of distant memory once said, "Always start any conversation with your spouse with 'I'm sorry' -- chances are it'll be required, perhaps even demanded, anyway.") I apologize because my normal habit is to dig down through the silver lining in anything, and find the dark cloud. Being, of course, that this blog originally started as a protest (see "About this blog" for details), I am simply continuing the tradition here.
       I also apologize 'cause this posting marks a return to the abstract -- in stark contrast to the previous one, which was all hands-on.
        I have mentioned that I started my early adult life as a musician -- a performance major on viola, a singer/songwriter, a performing tenor, the son of a PhD musicologist and choir director. I lived through the "digital revolution" in recording and sound production. There are a lot of folks in my past (and some in the present, for that matter) who fought the move to CDs and MP3's. They contended that sound itself was analog and continuous. Reducing it to a series of zeros and ones made it clunky, machine-like, un-human. (I was certainly not one of them -- I do not miss my turntable, and destroyed enough vinyl to cover a kitchen floor the size of Wyoming. Work with me, here, it's a metaphor... ;-)
       The conference I just attended, based on a 20-minute presentation format, had the impact of carving up educational practice into a series of small pieces. This reflects trends happening all over education...

• National trends in curriculum, assessment, and teacher certification ("Common Core," "Quality Core," "National Board"...you name it), in conjunction with major "big data" movements (Kentucky's Continuous Instructional Improvement Technology System/CIITS is one) have the effect (if not the intent) of reducing the goals of instruction down to easily-measured discrete bits of knowledge.
• The tablet/personal device revolution has taken the world of computer programming and tool design out of big projects and platforms, and reduced it to discrete pieces called apps -- small programs which do specific things, often written and marketed by people with no educational vision.
• As illustrated by presentations like "20 web tools in 20 minutes," the "Interactive Internet" reflects the app trend, with thousands of tools doing clever, discrete, and isolated tasks.
• All of these changes are being shared and discussed through Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, which  sound-bytes them, often without analysis or comment.

The end result is a massive jumble of pieces of discrete information assaulting the classroom teacher (and everybody else), who often has little ability (and all too often little interest) in sorting it all out. It places pressure on teachers to translate these discrete pieces into instructional practices which address big goals and practices, such as project-based and collaborative learning.

Douglas Adams

       I'm not stupid. I do know that my professional life surrounds me with masses of early adopters and bleeding-edgers, and these are exactly the sorts of things they do, and are interested in. I'm also not stupid enough to ignore that, behind the tweets lies a community of thinkers and practitioners who drive exploration and innovation interactively. But the difficulty in reducing things down to discrete pieces is that one forgets what the whole looks like. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, "If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."
       Twitter did not invent the professional community. Online professional communities started with The Well, moved through UseNet (now Google Groups), diversified to bulletin boards and LISTSERVs, deepened and connected through RSS and the blogosphere, and only recently leverage social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Each of these platforms improved on the previous ones, and each sustained the loss of some of the earlier platforms' benefits.
       One thing that has changed, of course, is the level of participation. The Well certainly can't boast that it supported a billion members. But it would be a mistake to assume that the advantages of recent social networking platforms provide the sole reason for such increases. They provide only incremental improvements over what is already a huge advantage -- a way to connect anyone to anything across space and time, something shared by all the above platforms. It's just taken that long for a billion people to discover and embrace it. But I digress.
       The goal here is to keep our eye on the cat. As long as presenters and participants identify Twitter as the community, you've tied the characteristics of professional learning and knowledge construction to the platform -- it's foibles and limitations, its business model, its retched excesses, its 140 character limits...but even more important, its shelf life. The speed of change continues to accelerate  If we want our professional practice and discourse to improve, to continue to re-invent and extend our ability to "commune," we have to pay first heed and attention to the people and ideas the platform are connecting.
       Research really bears this out. An article in The Atlantic looked at participation in Facebook and social connections. According to the authors, FB does not improve or alter one's overall happiness or social connectedness -- it provides a distraction from the world of face-to-face family and relationships, and tends to reinforce them, but it does not replace or enhance them to any level of statistical significance. Restated, happiness and social connectedness does not increase for folks with high levels of FB use. If we applied that to the world of online learning communities on FB and Twitter, we can extrapolate that attending to the platform will not, in itself, improve your participation in the "social connectedness" of your professional life. Attention to professional connections needs to be working already -- that is, that world needs to have a life separate from the platform.
       Again, I apologize. I know that these tools and trends are important (I do participate in them myself), and they have the possibility to make things better. And a quick look at new tools is, if nothing else, just a lot of fun for teachers and observers. My only goal here is to insure we don't forget the cat. If you're focused solely on discrete pieces (and platforms which tend to traffic in/promote discrete pieces), the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working community.

If it’s “Viral,” Will You Get Sick?

       I’m currently a little enamored with the TED Talk video format. The videos got their start documenting talks at two annual conferences on “Technology, Entertainment, Design.” TED charges presenters to provide inspirational and game-changing ideas in 18 minutes or less. Not all of the presenters (and the videos preserving their talks) have something to offer, and there are even a few wildly misguided ones. But I’ve seen a slew of really inspiring ones – at least a couple which I would place in the epiphany category. Recently TED has moved to supporting short educational lessons  on specific ideas, produced by exemplary teachers in partnership with innovative animators. It was in pursuit of some of these new videos that I happened to catch Kevin Allocca, a YouTube “trends manager,” in a TED Talk titled “Why videos go viral.”

       As TED Talks go, it was pretty lightweight, getting some entertainment punch from such viral videos as “Friday” and “Nyan Cat.” Allocca states that three things can cause a video to go viral:

·         Tastemakers.  If someone already has a huge presence in pop culture, their endorsement (or indictment, really doesn’t matter which) will propel a video into the spotlight.

·         Communities of Participation. A large number of comments, satires, and parodies will add to the buzz.

·         Unexpectedness. No one will get excited about a video that portrays a predictable sequence of events. Videos which surprise and twist have a better chance.

       Allocca, of course, is doing a TED Talk because of a larger point – that viral videos (and the processes which produce them) represent broadly democratic participation in popular culture, empowering the creativity and ownership of people who might be, otherwise, simple consumers.
       Well, maybe.
       Interestingly, there is one thing missing from Allocca’s list: content! As the several examples he uses very ably illustrate, viral videos do not necessarily have great ideas (or, perhaps, any ideas at all) as a part of what makes them so popular. As a matter of fact, if you look at the list above, only the third point has really anything to do with content, a point further reinforced by the fact that most videos go viral months, sometimes years, after their first posting on YouTube. Viral videos are clearly, in themselves, not fulfilling any particular content or informational need.
       This is the Pandora’s Box of broad participation in social media – it is heavily slanted towards popular culture and mass entertainment, a place where interesting or high-quality content isn’t a sufficient condition for broad attention. It’s not even a necessary one.

       There are educators who think that the forces of social networking have broad implications for learning and instruction. (Yes, I’m one.) And the recent funding of greatly expanded wifi connectivity in many schools (and, with it, the possible support of personal, student-owned devices in classrooms) seems to be, at least in part, poised to leverage this potential. In this blog, I've written pretty extensively about how student ownership and collaborative knowledge construction can be greatly improved through online interactive project-based learning. However, a lot of teachers will be quite worried about this, for a few very good reasons. After all, a step into the world of social networking might very well be a step into the world in which content-free “viral” entertainment rules. This observation can even be heard by the better of our own students, a fact I witnessed at a recent student focus group meeting. 

       The word “viral” used to have a negative connotation, and the other declensions of its noun form, “virus,” still do. Take “virulent,” whose first two definitions are “…actively poisonous; intensely noxious..,.” and “…highly infective; malignant or deadly…” Maybe the new use of the word “viral” still should have a connection to its old meaning.  The fear isn't just what social media produces, but what it displaces – if socially-produced content is given a presence, does it take the place of something much more valuable?
        Of course, there are lots of examples of “viral” videos with actual content (some TED Talks amongst them, and Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture” being another I can think of quickly). Crowdsourcing media production, and learning, has potential value, but it is the presence of a guiding editorial force which makes TED so much better than most of the YouTube fodder. So the trick will be to leverage the best of participatory culture and media in an environment which includes knowledgeable, experienced guiding forces.
        Seems a little like a classroom, doesn’t it?
        We have been here before. This isn’t really a substantial shift from the first use of Internet access in instruction over 15 years ago. Then, as now, It will become an educational wasteland, if teachers fail to participate in it themselves, and fail to help facilitate its effective use.  The solution then, and now, isn’t just to turn off the computers. Nor is it to pretend that social media production constitutes, in itself, a lesson plan. (I can still remember teachers coming to the computer lab, handing a general research topic to their students, and then sitting in a corner reading the newspaper for the entire class period. The results were a waste of time and technology. That is my biggest fear!)

        Like the treatment of an enormous number of virus-inducing diseases, the best way to avoid getting sick is to have been slightly infected already – the guiding principle behind most vaccines. It’s tricky – there are teachers out there who have actually become fully infected. (I know a half-dozen who spend more time on Facebook pursuing entertainment than they do reading, and the 10-hour version of “Nyan Cat” has had over 12,000,000 views. Ten hours? A-choo!!)
      We should recognize the bulk of viral videos for their banality. But with the addition of the goals and experiences of content-driven education, we should be prepared to embrace the participatory nature of social media production. If you want to be an effective teacher in the coming changing classroom landscape, some exposure to the “virus” will go a long way towards making it work for learning.

Dancin' With Myself

       I don’t know if any of you have been following particularly closely, but my blog entries seem to regularly wander into 80′s pop music. I’ve cited Devo, Re-Flex, Talking Heads, and here I am with a line from Billy Idol. But as always, this isn’t about music. In this case, it’s about writing, something one wouldn’t normally associate with the bad British rocker with the bleach-blond tangle and the Elvis-like snarl.

       In the early days of social networking, most online participants were pretty self-consciously anonymous. This tendency was equal parts self-protection and self-indulgence.

       The former was a natural reaction — if you had no idea who anyone really was online (and a lot of people were pretending to be someone else for very suspicious reasons), the best defense was to not be yourself, either. The latter, of course, was a way of getting something for nothing — if you couldn’t be yourself, it was fun and exciting to re-create yourself as someone else — older, smarter, better-educated, even a completely different nationality or even gender. In a real sense, it was “dancing with yourself” – you were creating a personna with which you could play. It was a perfect reflection of the overwhelming majority of the social-networkers back then — tweens, teens, and young adults, who were, in fact, trying to create themselves in real life at the same time. But it was a great deal more self-serving, a little less purposeful, and a whole lot more self-indulgent.
       There’s nothing really wrong with all that. But the overwhelming majority of “dancing” we do in our professional and educational lives is with someone else. That is, we select a partner, and we coordinate our moves and steps to fit what that partner is good at, or interested in. We certainly have our own flair, abilities, and personna, but that doesn’t solely define the purpose, or even the character, of the dance.
       Writing is like that — when we write, we certainly want to be creative, skilled, individual, maybe even flashy. But in so-called real life, we’re most likely writing for a purpose, and that purpose requires that we attend to someone else — our audience. If we’re writing an advertisement, we have to know who might want the product, and leverage their other interests to create this new one. If we’re a newspaper reporter, we should know the reading habits and abilities of the audience of our report. If we’re simply applying for a job and writing a resumé, we’ll have no chance of winning the job unless we incorporate our future employer’s interests into our story. We do this by opening up, watching, listening — stepping out of ourselves enough to become aware of the person we hope is watching us, to learn what they’re like, what they want, what they hold as important.
       As teachers, we have to be aware that writing online brings with it some challenges. Our students have their own habits — habits they developed long before we (or any other adult, for that matter) decided to watch. They will tend to be brief, and will feel justified in purposeful misspellings and Internet slang. But even more important, when writing online, they’ll naturally stop caring about audience, since the audience can be, well, anyone and everyone. The results at best self-indulgent, disconnected, and at worst, embarrassingly inept and even, perhaps, insulting. If you don’t know your partner, you’ll be constantly in danger of stepping on toes.
       This is not to mean that online writing in a social context has no purpose, or can only produce terrible results. All writing (on or off line) takes place in a social context, but good writing is self-aware, consciously recognizing that context, and leveraging it for increased effectiveness. Like all things in education, there has to be a “smart person” in the room, guiding and critiquing the student to focus outside of himself. With such guidance, the student will improve, as will the massive amounts of content almost all young people produce online every day.
       Dancing with someone else is almost always a lot more enjoyable, as well as being much more valuable. Besides, I really can’t say I ever liked that Elvis-like snarl….

Footprints In the CyberSnow

        Watching the changing face of professional electronic discourse is a little like following footprints through a popular snow-covered woods. The trails are sometimes single file, sometimes a wide swath. Individual lines of footprints join and veer off the main trails, seemingly at random, without a clear sense of consensus and direction. You might join the common trail for a sense of belonging, or if its direction coincides with your own. But you will veer off in a new direction if both wane.
       That was me this past week, when I resigned as the lead moderator for the international discussion list EDTECH. EDTECH began 22 years ago as a project of Michigan State University doctoral student Vickie Banks Gaynor. I joined it as a member in 1997, becoming a moderator three years later. For more than a decade, my and the EDTECH members’ footprints had a common direction, and I reveled in it.
        The new, hot discussion platform in the 80’s was an email-based distributed discussion system called LISTSERV. (Nope, I’m not shouting – its name, and the name of the EDTECH discussion list itself, were traditionally typed in all caps.) At that time, LISTSERV was freeware (it's now commercial), and was often integrated with the groupware program BitNet. Discussion postings were delivered to members through email by LISTSERV, and also in threaded form on BitNet in what looked very much like an Internet bulletin board or forum. A few years after its inception, EDTECH was absorbed by Michigan State’s humanities discussion system, H-Net, an affiliation it retains to this day. The original BitNet feed still exists, though most such feeds were purchased by Google and added to Google Groups quite a while ago.
        EDTECH was by no means my first LISTSERV. Nearly ten years before joining EDTECH I’d discovered a discussion hosted by graduate students at Indiana University called “The Dead Teacher’s Society.” Unlike EDTECH, it was an un-moderated list. Between LISTSERV, Bitnet, and UseNet, there were thousands of un-moderated discussion feeds. At that time, the idea that postings could be delivered instantly in multiple directions to thousands of participants instantly was pretty revolutionary…and scary.

Flame War: ...a series of flame posts or messages in a thread that are considered derogatory in nature or are completely off-topic. Often these flames are posted for the sole purpose of offending or upsetting other users. The flame becomes a flame war when other users respond to the thread with their own flame message. (http://www.webopedia.com/)

       Such unmonitored (and largely “off the social mainstream grid”) platforms produced lots of off-center feeds, such as sexual fetishes and political extremes. Even for serious mainstream topics, un-moderated lists followed a cycle of initiation, enthusiastic growth, mature discussion, deterioration through “flame wars”/spamming/off-topic contributions, and eventual decline and extinction as the original and more serious participants grew disillusioned and abandoned the list. The trail would go from thousands of footprints, to a very few, stomping through the drifts, before evaporating altogether. The Dead Teacher’s Society was still relatively active when I joined it (and I was completely enamored with the concept), but it quickly became a megaphone for a few self-promoting individualists and an occasional flame war.
        In contrast, EDTECH was moderated – postings were screened and distributed only by the list’s moderators. This had one disadvantage: every post had to be touched by a list moderator before it was distributed through email or appeared in the BitNet feed (which slowed things down); and one advantage: the quality of the postings was consistently high, very professionally focused, and often quite scholarly. Missing were the “me too” and off-topic fluff of ordinary social interaction, the flame wars, bad language, self-promotion and commercial advertising. That’s why it enjoyed such a long and glorious history, with hundreds of postings daily in its heyday.
        BitNet and LISTSERV were powerful stuff. BitNet subjects were “feeds,” being fed directly by participants, and through the email contributions of the LISTSERV. Since it was threaded, you could search/display by subject thread, or by author, or do open text searches. Its tools would be quite familiar to anyone using Twitter today, with the possible exception of the lack of Twitter’s point-and-click ease of use. LISTSERV/list archives/Google Group feeds remain a very powerful technology. That’s not why I left EDTECH. Like everything else in life, I left it because nearly everybody else had as well. A year or two ago, the trail I was following there had dropped to a very few footprints. EDTECH’s volume has fallen from hundreds of postings a day to hundreds of postings a month (or less).
        Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter are certainly GUI-er, but their main advantage these days isn’t “how,” but “who.” Almost anyone of consequence is Tweeting. The online discussions of 20 years ago are now Twitter feeds and hash-tag threads. But even more importantly, since mainstream society has embraced it, the wretched excesses of BitNet and UseNet are largely missing, or at least hidden, for the average user of Twitter and Facebook. The early discussion platforms like BitNet were dominated by libertarian, geeky college students. It’s really quite remarkable what can happen when those students’ parents suddenly show up and start participating. My Facebook news feed has gone from a minefield of “F-bombs,” to PG, in a little over a year.
        I must say – at the risk of sounding like one of the die-hard EDTECH participants – I’m not really excited about the switch. LISTSERV had no restriction on posting length. It also enjoyed a more traditional “question and answer” back-and-forth pattern of participation, which in Twitter has been replaced by short declamatory sentences with a self-promotion feel. Because of this, I had arrogantly predicted that Twitter would be gone in two years; that was over three years ago. I obviously did not anticipate the masses of people and activity – social and professional alike – that would flock to this new platform. But they did. And if one is to be in the conversation, it behooves one to join it, or at least feed it.
        But whether by un-moderated excesses or simple popularity, all things tend to cycle. Twitter will, itself, become yesterday’s news and disappear, just as BitNet and UseNet have. (Interestingly, the KERA list of the University of Kentucky – KYDTC and others – are keeping LISTSERV alive in Kentucky, at least for now.) So my prediction above is probably not wrong, it’s just off in its timing. No platform is forever. But, for me, it is time for me to move on, and join the currently better-used path. I’ll miss EDTECH, but being as most of the better players in it are gone, I won’t miss it that much. We’ll see if the structural limitations of Twitter can still support the sort of professional discourse which is my habit and passion. After all, online professional discussion isn’t about platforms, it’s about ideas and knowledge construction, the one thing that SHOULD transcend the changeover in platform popularity.

        Goodbye, EDTECH. It’s time to try another trail of footprints.

Are you (dis)connected?

        Making connections is all the buzz -- connecting students to authentic learning, experts, even each other. At this point in history, the technology tools and contexts in which to “connect” are overwhelming in number, and begging for attention. Today, “connect” doesn’t force technology use, but it almost certainly can’t avoid it. And many celebrators of the concept of connection and collaboration are almost indistinguishable from celebrators of the tools they use for such. That is, “Connect!” and “Use this tool!” are, in many advocates’ minds, interchangeable ideas. That has actually produced a couple of interesting disconnects in technology use in education.

The Promise and Practice of Web 2.0: It’s a scary world out there.

        I had just poked into a district office, and the discussion there was about Facebook. It’s a well-worn trail, and in this context the remarks are almost invariably negative, with most of those present saying they never went there, and never would. At the other extreme are the dozens of my professional acquaintances and colleagues who use it to support their professional interests. On their "walls," I am as likely to read about what school they visited or what instructional idea they’ve tried, as I am to hear about their son/daughter’s exploits on the track or court, or the last restaurant they visited. All is thrown in together in a pile.

        Although the world beyond PK-12 education is pretty much firmly entrenched in the idea of online connections in support of professional interests, in the face of Federal child safety legislation and most end user license agreements of known Web 2.0 tools (including Facebook), most teachers are still trying to figure out whether these tools are even legal to use in the classroom, much less safe, or even more important, instructionally valuable. Both the advocates and the detractors of Facebook, like the blind men and the elephant, are grabbing onto different parts of the elephant and declaring its basic character.

        Both are right, and both are wrong. But neither note that we’re trying to evaluate the usefulness of the whole elephant at once by looking at a single aspect of it. Yes, “it” is important, and yes, “it” is unsafe and frivolous...if we’re just talking about Facebook. Of course, what we should be talking about is learning. It’s a disconnect, and neither side has done a particularly good job of addressing why it is one.

The Promise and Practice of Technology in Instruction: Who’s paradigm shift is it anyway?

       Everybody has their pet phrase. “Knowledge construction.” “Collaborative learning.” “Project-based learning.” “Discovery learning.” “Authentic learning.” Almost everybody agrees that the old traditional instructional paradigm of teacher-driven lecture and summative assessment is, if not actually dead, at least seriously outflanked. The charge against it is being led by something as simply-defined as the Kahn Academy (a website dedicated to tutorial videos on school subjects), or as currently trendy and complex as the idea of use of student-owned smart phones and other personal devices in the classroom.

        That, of course, is the implied shift associated with connected technology use. In fact, most teachers view educational technology in terms of “Smart” classroom tools, large digital display, “clickers,” media delivery systems, and laptop carts, all of which are aimed at preserving the teacher’s tenuous grasp on their primacy as a content presenter. To make matters worse, many teachers observe, and recent studies are beginning to show, that direct student control over information delivery (phones, computers, whatever) doesn’t always lead to higher learning outcomes. Students usually lack the personal goals and motivation to attend to that which will improve their learning, if given the choice, so they fall back on their social-driven habits.

       It is clear that the promise and practice of technology-driven shift represents another serious disconnect.

        These disconnects are symptoms of how technology’s role in the classroom tends to get trivialized and distracted by the popularity of a specific platform or tool. A good illustration is the battle over texted communications. Tech advocates and observers are quick to point out that kids text, and they view email as “old people’s communications.” That’s one piece of the elephant. And, for kids, almost all student texts are social. On other side of the elephant, if you go into an actual adult workplace, texting is one of many communications platforms one will have to use to do work, and email often figures prominently in that list.

        But the debate misses the point. Are we supposed to be teaching our students to text, or to communicate? The discussion about paradigm shift shouldn’t be about tool selection, it should be about content and practice. That is our job as educators.

        By the time our students leave us, all of the tools will have changed anyway. But that doesn't remove us from our responsibilities relative to the technologies. We need to actually, meaningfully engage in the behaviors the shift implies. Don't get tied up in the tools, but don't skip them either. They aren't the paradigm, but they do deliver it. It's a delicate balance, but implementing connections in the 21st Century classroom requires that we do so.

If not you, who? If not now, when?

        It's here -- a standard, in amongst all the other writing standards, that specifically addresses what it means to be a writer in the 21^st Century...

Writing Standards K-5 - Grade 5 Students: Standard 6.

With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others..

       This standard is one of the new Common Core State Standards adapted by the Kentucky Department of Education, now in training for implementation in the fall. It makes succinct what our students already know: that writing for most purposes involves collaboration and connection. And the way in which students connect, collaborate – even write – is online.
       It’s in the Standards, so will it be in instruction? The process of “deconstructing” the standards in preparation for designing lessons is fully underway, and this standard (as of April 1, 2011) has yet even get that far (see KDE's list). But does it need to be? Is the fact that it’s a separate standard mean that, in fact, it needs separate “air time?” In an ideal world, no, if, in fact, it was already uniformly distributed throughout the other standards, and a teacher's practice. That is as it should be. In the world of higher education and professional work, most writing is connected. Nearly all readers are interactively connected to the writing they consume. Even further, a lot of writings (from textbooks to encyclopedias) are now produced collaboratively online, with many authors, and constantly negotiated content changes and additions. The implication is, in the post-secondary world, writing without interactive connection is rare, and so addressing it separately would be like addressing auto repair without electronic diagnostics.

        That’s the world our students already live in, and is most certainly the one they’ll join when they leave us. Although my “research” is anecdotal and incomplete, I’m thinking it isn’t the world most of our teachers live in. That means, if left to their own devices, chances are that most teachers won’t view this standard as that important. Many may not even know what it means. With that knowledge, the standard probably needs to be specifically addressed, and that is the intent of the Common Core Standards as written. But when, and by whom?

        As a tech integration specialist, I’m pretty used to being invited to the party late. A professional development class is being designed, or a unit is being built, and someone has the idea that, maybe, it should have a technology component. (After all, a lot of folks are talking about technology, so we probably ought to include something!) So I'm called. But when that happens, inevitably, I walk into a room in which the big decisions about content and pedagogy have already been made. The results are a lot of clever graphs and images.

        In the digital age, is it really possible to start a discussion about pedagogy without technology? For this argument, I’m setting aside the revolution implied by a lot of technology tool use – knowledge construction, project-based instruction, student-driven learning, the trifecta generally associated with online and connected learning. Let’s just stick with Standard 6 above. We’ll take something really easy – a personal narrative about some incident in a student's life. Traditionally, a teacher would establish a rubric, pass out instructions, collect the results of the assignment, and grade them. If the lesson needs more "real life" connections, that might change the assigned writing topic. And the impact of my coming into the party late might be that the students are asked to read the instructions online, type them up in Word with some nice added clipart, and upload the results into a learning management system. Good, we’ve got technology in.

       Did we cover the standard? Did the student “publish?” Did they “interact with others?” Did they “collaborate?” Obviously not. To truly reflect the standard, we could redesign the lesson, and have students publish their writings as blog entries, providing for online peer comments and suggestions, and then have that feed a collaborative rewriting process through a wiki. This approach (very different from my “upload Word document” example) actually addresses the intent of the standard. But the changes have a profound impact on the original lesson performance expectation, the rubric, work completion, and grading, so adding this standard would require major changes to the original lesson design. The point, of course, is that it is not possible to begin the lesson planning process without having already selected the technologies, and incorporated their implications into how students write, learn, and are graded.

        It’s a standard, but the standard simply asks the same question the students themselves are asking their teachers: If not you, who? If not now, when?

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!