Do We Really Even Still Need the Question Mark?

       Well, wasn’t that title just a little bit of irony?! But then, I just love such things. There’s a lot hiding behind the question, of course, and it involves the wonderful world of online discourse.

       It is always with some trepidation that I do what I’m about to do, ‘cause I’m painfully aware that a young perspective will be somewhat different than my own (which goes along with the fact that I am not, in fact, a young person). But I began this blog as an examination of the implications of new technologies for human behavior and communication, and that tradition will continue here.
       One of the first communications technologies with which I became acquainted was the LISTSERV, an email-based discussion list which provided archives and a feed to the old BitNet for bulletin board-style display. I’ve written about them here before, and have observed that all online communications platforms are a great deal more alike than they are different. But there has been a slow but profound shift in the style of discourse.
       I will now engage in some very unscientific data gathering. EDTECH, a LISTSERV I used to moderate, still maintains archives going back to 1989. It took a few years for it to pick up steam and become popular, so I picked an arbitrary month: January, 1995. Of the 48 posts that day, 9 originated threads. 2 of those were announcements, the remaining 7 were questions. All of the other 39 were in responses to questions by others. Hence, only 2 of the 48 posts were not associated with someone asking a question of the collected wisdom of the EDTECH list community. And that was just one day.
       For contrast, I fired up my Twitter account and searched the #EDTECH hashtag. Of the 23 recent tweets, two contained questions, but they were both rhetorical, answered later in the same tweet. None actually asked questions. All were announcements or links to resources elsewhere. There were also none on my Facebook feed, although I did not attempt to narrow that by any subject search.
       So here’s the question I’m really asking: What has happened? Maybe people didn’t know very much back in 1995. Or maybe people didn’t know as much about technology in 1995. A lot has happened since then, for sure, but I’m not buying that as an explanation for a behavior change. It’s a little like saying that it was a lot easier to teach US History in 1995, ‘cause there’s been nearly 20 years more history since then.
       Perhaps my study is flawed because the sample is of two radically different populations. Perhaps. The membership of the LISTSERV back in 1995 would have been probably equally divided between K-12 practitioners and higher-ed teacher educators and observes. That pretty much matches the few names I could pick out of the #EDTECH tweet list – I most certainly don’t know them all, hence the “unscientific” nature of my study. Probably the most significant aspect of the LISTSERV population is that these were all early adopters – members of a small group of people engaging in online discussion before it was common, But would that make them less or more likely to ask questions?
       Maybe a much more likely explanation is that the LISTSERV was set up by someone specifically interested in providing a place to ask questions. In contrast, Twitter and Facebook are specifically set up to encourage the declarative – Twitter’s tweet composer specifically asks “What’s happening?” Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” Both seem to encourage the participant to answer those questions, rather than posing questions of her own. But in any case, my sense is that something has fundamentally changed about the nature of online discourse. And my contention is that it isn’t positive.

       All of the education technology observers I know are all about the deeper end of the learning pool – problem/project-based learning, Socratic method, critical thinking, student-driven learning – lots of implied question-asking in those learning paradigms. But when we look at these same people in the open arena of online discourse, things are quite different. Everybody wants to be a leader using the declarative, and no one wants to be a follower asking the question.
       Well into the 2nd decade of the 21st Century, our society has relegated the question mark to secondary status. If we really want to know something, we ask Google or Bing, though we call that a "search," not a question. (It's a little easier to see now, isn't it, why "Ask Jeeves" died as a search engine trade mark!) A search engine will not notice, or care, that we don’t already know the answer. Of course, we'll have lost that very basic of human behaviors, asking for help.
         And we don’t even have to use a question mark.

High Schools, Part 2: Judi Day, and the Video-Linked Classroom

Judi Day at the beginnings of Fayette Co,'s VLC, 2002

       Judi Day taught mathematics at Lafayette High School, specifically upper level courses such as calculus, retiring several years ago. Two weeks ago (Wednesday, April 17, 2013) she succumbed to cancer. She was a first-rate teacher, and will be missed by those who knew her.
      Although my background is high school mathematics as well, my contact with Judi was never directly about that. I have been the coordinator of the Video-Linked Classroom program at Fayette County Schools for over 12 years, most of that program's existence. The VLC provides technology support for connecting high school classes together though videoconference hardware, providing the ability of one high school to serve classes for which they have no instructor, or insufficient class enrollment to justify providing one. Our district has provided a supplemental stipend for a teacher willing to teach remote students, and the technology office has provided the hardware and logistic support. All the "remote" school need supply is supervision and test proctoring. The idea is such a simple and elegant one, you would think the program would sell itself.

Remote students

       Back in 2002, a local high school had 5-6 students wanting to take Calc B/C (a second year calculus course at the high school level). With those counts there was no way to justify paying staff to offer the course, and the math department chair there asked for a video-link connection. It took a little schmoozing to get Judi on board, but she proved to be the perfect choice. She deeply cared about students no matter where they sat, was willing to become familiar with the small amount of technology required (mostly just a document camera), and, not incidentally, was unafraid of being on camera. She regularly stated that her best Calc II students were at the remote site, a remark that matched most of the research on this style of distance education -- after all, students taking a course through a videoconference link were doing so because the only other option was doing without. Those students tended to be quite motivated.
       Judi taught a least one video-linked class almost continuously over the last 8-9 years of her teaching career. She taught probably 1/3 to 1/2 of all the classes offered this way in our district. She was the program's rock star.
       The program is still active, and the teacher who took over and continues Judi's legacy, has been great. But all of the problems associated with high schools mentioned in my previous posting -- a tendency to be isolated, disconnected, overly self-aware -- have prevented this program from expanding. In the last few years, students and faculty have tended to view a video-linked classroom not as an opportunity, but as a school failure, and the results can poison the successes Judi enjoyed. All too often, the program is a last-ditch attempt to simply "get this staffing/course offering problem off my desk," with no support or enthusiasm for what it then attempts to accomplish.
       This matches similar problems for distance education in general. Although online learning continues to expand at an incredible pace, in all too many cases it is viewed as a way to solve program offering problems cheaply and easily. The result is a mash-up of badly-constructed courses, inattentive online teachers, and sky-high attrition rates. Rather than embracing online learning as a connected, information-rich opportunity, high schools view them as 4th and 5th choices, and their value is undermined even before the first assignment is due. Even negative course design characteristics (quirky teaching styles, bad pedagogy, low-level activities) become the fault of the delivery platform. The result is a huge chasm between a student's otherwise heavily connected personal life, state programs and initiatives looking to save money and embrace trends, and the high school leadership and faculty using (or avoiding) these services. The whole thing ends up being a huge self-fulfilling prophecy, often with high schools congratulating themselves on how well they've protected their students from the evils of low-performing distance learning opportunities.
       But in Judi's case, things were so much simpler. The instructional practice was "real time," the pedagogy was pretty traditional (close to "chalk and talk"), and year after year the program actually served students, providing great test scores. No technology can overcome bad teaching, nor does technology suppress great teaching. When that camera went on, there was a twinkle in Judi's eye, and the kids could see it at both end of the connection.
      We'll miss you, Judi...

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.

The Case for the Private Cloud

What is a cloud?
       "Geek-speakers" really struggle to keep the vocabulary fresh, the edge bleeding (if you will). This time, the metaphor is a little short of perfect. In science, a cloud is a visible mass of lighter-than-air water droplets. In technology, a cloud is a collection of computer applications delivered over a network as services. So a cloud is a network, and visible water droplets are software applications. It's a stretch. Some of the wretched excesses of that fluffy dark thing hanging over your afternoon golf game might be, metaphorically, more accurate than we'd like. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
       Of course, 40 years ago, virtually all applications were delivered over networks, since the computers were room-sized. You connected using a dumb terminal (little more than a display and a keyboard -- see at left) to a mainframe computer somewhere else, to run a program. But sitting neatly between mainframe computing and cloud computing is the age of the microcomputer (still underway, in point of fact), which had, at its beginning, two relevant characteristics: 1) it was mostly about purchasing and managing objects (hardware, software, peripherals), and 2) networks were useful, but not necessary, to do work. (Remember sharing your Internet connection with your telephone? OK, probably not, but I do! The handset modem at right was how I connected to the university mainframe at my first teaching position.) These days, connecting things together has become the driving force in computing. We can blame the "mother of all networks," the Internet, for bringing us back around full circle. Since the geek-speakers have the memory of a gnat, it's all new, and it needs a new word. It's a cloud.
        But, of course, that isn't to imply that nothing is actually new. Before the Internet, networks were small, for lots of reasons (some were good reasons, and we'll look at that in a bit). So, the new part of the "cloud" concept is that applications can be really made available globally, over the entire Internet, to anyone. From a business perspective, the result has the same impact as Napster had on the music industry, the e-book has on print -- it's no longer about delivering or selling objects, it's about delivering or selling capabilities. From a software perspective, that means we use Office 360 or Google Docs to word process, rather than purchasing a stand-alone copy of some software to run on our very own computer.

Why should I care?

        Well, the Internet did happen for some very good reasons. When the tools of productivity move online, it makes information sharing, collaborating and group learning a lot easier, hence "cloud computing" is often associated with social networking and online learning management. From blogs to Facebook, people aren't just writing online, they're connecting, sharing, and constructing together. That's probably the most obvious advantage.
        Another is very much in evidence in the age of smart phones. Since the computing work is actually done "on the cloud" (that is, somewhere else), the device used to access such a service can actually be quite cheap and simple. It takes a reasonably powerful computer to run Microsoft Office 2010. In contrast, you can word-process "on the cloud" from your smart phone.
        Then there's software cost. As Google and others have shown, there really is no need to sell such services, so a lot of companies provide their services for "free," making a profit through selling ad space, or other marketing tools such as data harvested from the users of the service. The software isn't really free -- it's just being underwritten by thousands of advertisers. To further sweeten the pot, upgrades and bug fixes don't have dissemination issues. There's nothing to download since the software lives one place -- no one even notices the fix is in.

OK, well, so what's a "Private Cloud?"

        A "private cloud" is essentially the same idea as a public cloud, except that the folks using the service are part of a closed collection of people. Unlike the private networks of 40 years ago, "closed" doesn't mean disconnected. The convergence of the Internet and the private network means that we can define "closed" or "private" virtually, through a central list of access credentials, without giving up the "anytime, any place" of public, Internet-based computing. Although a private cloud usually lives physically inside a district wide area network, it's still available to that same collection of people, no matter whether they're sitting in their home school, or half a world away.

Why a Private Cloud?

       Private clouds exist for a variety of reasons, but privacy, as you might guess, is a big one. Private clouds are used by private companies or organizations with resource and business interests to protect, or organizations serving a unique population such as children.
        An organization wanting to run a private cloud has to contract with (i.e. pay for) a service, or purchase hardware to run them within their own network. It usually needs paying someone to maintain the services, and support the people who use them. Some of those costs would exist anyway (after all, supporting teachers in the use of any tool, private or public, requires staff time), but running online software yourself does add something to the equation. To reduce costs, many private clouds run open source services or other free software. The private services my district uses include Moodle (online learning management), Mahara (social networking and ePortfolios), SharePoint (professional workflow), Wordpress (blogging and interactive writing), and Umbraco (public website support).
        On the public cloud, we could have replaced Moodle with Edmodo, Mahara with Facebook, SharePoint with Google Docs, and Umbraco with any of a bunch of free or inexpensive web hosting services. Some of the reasons we've resisted would have been familiar with the old mainframe folks -- privacy, central management, support, consistency of service, and network security. But since we're in the business of supporting teachers and student learning, I'll use that perspective to flesh out some of these, and other, advantages.
        It is amazing how many thorny questions teachers ask us about the public cloud which don't even need to get asked when the cloud is private, like...

• “Who is that…really?” In a private cloud, you know who everybody is, since the account was created and assigned to a specific person inside the organization. At any time, if you stop being confident that you know who an account represents, anyone with rights to your network can turn off the account. That greatly simplifies privacy and enforcement. Public cloud tools are based on a personal account model, making the question above (and the enforcement problems it implies) much more difficult.
• “Did you see THAT?” Inappropriate stuff online is always a problem, and a public cloud tool will always struggle with the problem of inappropriate content. In addition, most public cloud tools carry ads, and ads mean that your students are being targeted for commercial purposes. Often the things being sold aren’t appropriate for their age. A private cloud has none of these problems.
• “Can I use this for free for the life of my instructional needs? …this year? …this week?” Ning (social network tool), Jaycut (video editing), Glogster (collaboration tool), even the New York Times started out being free public cloud tools, and are now charging for their services. This is a tried-and-true business model, which works fine in the private sector where all of the players are private citizens. But for teachers serving public school students, waking up one morning and finding your tool has suddenly changed to a pay-for-services model means a change of instructional practice, often even lost activities and resources representing a time investment. On a private cloud, teachers don't have to worry about things suddenly disappearing or costing money.
• “Should I ‘friend’ my students?” Most teachers are strongly advised against “friending” students on Facebook, for good reasons. Some states have even attempted to outlaw it! In contrast, on the private cloud, where all the people are known, the answer is clearly yes — it’s like asking “Should I speak to my students?”
• “I can’t find…” Most teachers are not sophisticated computer users, hence a lot of technical support can be just helping someone retrieve an accidentally-deleted or overwritten file, or locating something that got lost or corrupted. On the public cloud (especially the free one), you’re pretty much on your own — if you accidentally delete something, or misplace it, there usually is no tech support safety net.
• “May I do this?” The public cloud must, by Federal law, restrict who can use it, and how. Because of that, most tools with social networking components require specific parent permissions for students under 13 (Edmodo sets that age at 18). Hence, a teacher of young students has to specifically acquire and manage parent permissions to use such tools, or run the risk of breaking the law (or, even worse, the wishes of a student’s very concerned parents, the reason the laws exist in the first place). In contrast, the private cloud is covered by a school’s Acceptable Use Policy contract.
• “CAN I do this?” There is really no substitute for asking this question of the people who install, implement, and support the cloud tools you use. You will find that, even without the power of the public cloud, the answer is usually “Yes!” In addition, with a private cloud, decisions about changes and upgrades are made with you, the teacher, in mind — no business model, no board of directors, no collection of advertisers, no shareholders, no IT staff with their own schedule and interests. In my district, many of the decisions about our cloud tools are actually made by interested teachers in regularly-scheduled focus group meetings.

        This does not mean that the public cloud doesn’t have anything to offer teachers and their student learning goals. With massive budgets and huge IT staff, many big public cloud players have the ability to innovate and expand. For some teachers, a private cloud will never be quite as snappy, attractive, and extensive as the tools they find and use “out there.” But before they do, we tell them to read the list of questions above, and make sure they understand them all. But even more importantly, we ask then to ask themselves what they want their students to do and learn. In almost all cases, the private cloud has answers that work.
        Metaphorically, a cloud is ill-defined, hard to contain and predict, and often all wet. Bringing your cloud "indoors" requires effort and some expense, but it makes it a lot easier for most teachers and students to use it comfortably.

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!

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.