I'm over the Internet

For pure shock value (and readership), it’s always good to title one’s blog entry with hyperbole. Yup, that's today. Fact is, I’ll be giving up my anytime, anywhere access to information, people, and resources, uh...well, OK, never. But I do have a point to make. 

As with all things like this, it was stimulated by a relatively small event. My wife’s addiction to her iPad, and the Facebook and Pinterest it delivers, is pretty pervasive. (An aside: my culinary experiences are extensive and of high quality, so no complaints here!) She discovered a couple of weeks ago that Safari (the iPad’s browser) was only sporadically allowing her to “like” and “comment” in Facebook, which took almost all the pleasure out of it. Her solution, of course, was to post this problem right back into Facebook, where she got a chorus of other iPad users with exactly the same problem. My observation was that FB’s constant tweaking of its underlying code probably delivered something that got stuck in Safari's craw, causing it to give up, mid-page-load, in disgust. Often, the code behind a lot of interactive Internet sites is extensive enough that it pushes the limits of browsers. And, like a YouTube stuck in “buffer limbo,” the whole experience will just hang mid-“sentence.” and the stuff well below what actually broke the stream will fail to work too.

Of course, lots of people would say, “That’s the price you pay for a very full Internet experience.” To which I say, “Bah!” (Usually, of course, with a sufficiently menacing wave of my cane.) Frankly, I got a full phone conversation experience well before there were cell phones, and the fact that cell phones only work 75% of the time, is a step backwards from the “full phone experience.” (Since we’re just talking about the “phone experience," let’s ignore all the other stuff cells do these days, for now. Hyperbole, remember?) In many technology arenas, we’re regularly trading dependability for capability. That’s happening in Internet browsers too.

 This, of course, is all being driven by the fact that the Internet has become one of the biggest cash cows in our society. Although online holiday sales are not yet surpassing traditional retail in volume, the time is coming. Beyond retail (and, one could argue, even inside, throwing Amazon into the mix), there has been a consistent pattern in many online commercial ventures…

1. Come up with an idea which you think will be attractive to a large number of people.
2. Build the site supporting this idea, and give away access to it for free.
3. If it becomes enormously popular, try to figure out some way of making money from it.

That is exactly what’s happening with social networking online. You could argue that Facebook didn’t start out with a business plan, but now that it has almost a billion users (and, even more important, shareholders to make happy), it’s hell-bent on making one happen. That might very well be what caught my wife and her iPad-using “friends” – the code tweaks were a direct result of trying to increase the targeted ads and other commercial clickables on a user’s home page.

 OK, I will fully admit I was probably wrong about that (my wife’s problems disappeared a few days after an OS upgrade), but I’ve had multiple functionality crashes that I know were from this.

Here’s the deal. If the increase in functionality actually improves our experience online – that is, makes it fuller and more valuable rather than just more profitable – and the tradeoff with dependability isn’t too annoying, I’m good. However, the Internet is still basically a place of links, images, media, and connections. All of these things worked quite fine, thank you very much, more than a decade ago. They still do on many sites. But the popups, embedded ads, redirects, survey prompts, and masses of “like” and “tweet” and “follow” buttons aren’t really improving things. They’re there just to distract, herd...and mostly sell.

It is important for us to remember that an awful lot of what we view as educationally valuable content and capability is actually delivered by us. We are the product, as Facebook observers are wont to state. We should make every effort to find platforms which aren't suffering from someone’s business plan. The Internet started out as a military and university project. Its roots are deep in people supporting each other through connections, and leveraging non-profit and cheap hosting services to do so. (Remember Bit-Net, IRC? They were non-commercial services with no interest in profits.)

I just spent an afternoon training on Windows 8. With it, Apple’s iTunes, the Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble Nook Color, it’s clear this will all get worse. Just like streaming video and cable/dish services are doing right now with TV/movie content, there may come a time when you’ll have to decide which Internet (Apple’s, Microsoft’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, or whatever is the next big thing) you want to use – a decision made at the point of hardware purchase. That’s going to be a very tough thing for public and higher education to digest.

But don’t mind me….it’s probably all just hyperbole…

“We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.”

       The above is the motto of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm started by eBay cofounder Peter Thiel. Their concern is that tech companies have lost interest in the “big questions” being asked by society – poverty, climate change, disease, productivity...big changes that make things better in a profound way – and are, instead, merely happy to rearrange existing content in creative ways, for the sole purpose of making money. In the lead article of this month’s MIT Technology Review, Jason Pontin compares our current state of technology advancement to that of 50 years ago, a decade which began with President John F. Kennedy’s charge to NASA, to “…commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to the Earth.”

       Kennedy’s challenge was met, but the effort was herculean – at one point the NASA budget was 4% of the total US Government budget. There were hundreds of technology problems being researched to support the lunar mission. But, more to the point, this charge, and the scramble by both public and private organizations to meet it, took place (could take place!) at a time when technology was viewed as a vehicle to make fundamental improvements in how we do the business of being human. It certainly helped that the US economy was on the rise then, but even if that were true now, the interest in funding research and development projects with distant and grand goals seems to be gone… from the political landscape, but also from the interests of entrepreneurs. Hence Founders Fund.

       That, of course, is not to say that Twitter and their social networking brethren aren't valuable. They are. But they provide only incremental change over previous technologies which did similar things. And, as such, they answer a question that no one was actually asking (or has largely been answered already). It’s like the difference between the questions “How can I make a better mousetrap?” and “How can we make personal transportation compatible with the coming massive increases in global wealth and population?” We can already trap mice. A better one might be profitable, but it’ll have only an incremental impact on our lives. In contrast, the second question has two few entrepreneurs asking it, and too few research and development projects addressing the large number of technologies that must be a part of its answer. It might have worked in 1961, but it's not working now.
       So, as an educator who selects and uses technology in the classroom, why should you care?
       There are three lessons we can apply directly in our classrooms.

1. Set the goals first. Often, the way tech innovation gets lost is that entrepreneur selects a technology (social networking connections online, for instance), and then tries to figure out how to make it different enough to be attractive and profitable. In the classroom, that mistake plays out by selecting the technology before the learning goal. If you’re selecting your technology first, you’re just generating self-interest and temporary motivation in students, without actually embedding its use in the greater interests of learning. Even global education technology “answers” like 1-1 laptop programs and universal access to “intelligent classroom” tools can only work if they are paired with real learning questions.
2. Make instruction real. This is closely related to #1 above. As an example, project-based learning is very popular now, and fits well with some of the other goals associated with technology-rich instruction. As anyone with experience in this lesson paradigm will tell you, if the goals (the "guiding questions") of the projects aren't real, engaging, and important, students won't care, and won't learn.
3. Connect across the curriculum Many of the current tech start-ups are often just the same techies, trying to re-invent the same techy answers to the same techy questions. The real innovators out there are connected to real people, real needs and interests, and real goals. As a matter of fact, the best technology start-ups are began by people with arts and humanities degrees, and tech company hirers often specifically target such people. In our world, technology use which provides and leverages connections across disciplines will have the best chance at achieving goal #2 above. It will also serve to connect all of the teachers in your building in the joint pursuit of preparing students for innovative and constructive work after they leave us.

       Thomas Friedman and others have stated that our students (and the economy in which they’ll live) will only survive if they learn how to connect, create, innovate – a truism which transfers to educational practice, and should serve as the mantra for tool selection and technology use in the classroom.

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.

What you can do NOW to get ready for BYOD

[This blog posting is in support of my presentation at TeachMeetKy, WKU/Bowling Green, Friday, Oct.5, 2012]

       A lot of districts are looking at the possibility of supporting student-owned personal devices in the classroom. There are a lot of good reasons...

1. Students are already familiar with, and can quickly and easily use, their own technology.
2. Schools/Districts can leverage student-owned devices, getting close to 1-1 computing in the classroom, but without the expense and support problems.
3. Just-in-time access to activities and resources online can transform the classroom.

       My district (Fayette) made the decision to support student personal devices near the end of last year, causing everybody to scurry around, thinking about what that would mean. If your classroom/school/district is contemplating this shift, here is a list of things you can do right now to make that happen successfully.

       This is a wish list -- a collection of talking points to get you thinking about what this means. No district will be able to do them all. 

The Technicals

1. Can we support it?
• Be prepared to help all platforms onto your wifi. It's a very good idea to buy examples of each (Android tablet, Kindle, iPad), and try them. Help teachers/adults get their smart phones online!
• Write the limits of your support of, and liability for, student personal devices into their AUP contract.
2. Secure? CIPA-compliant?
   • Needless to say, it's critical that your students know and use their network login accounts and district-supplied email address.
   • Make sure your system can register and associate devices with login accounts. 
   • Design AD groups to scale student access based on training (“Digital Drivers License”)
3. Will it connect and work?
   • Not just wifi capacity, but bandwidth all the way upstream.
   • “Transparent proxy” eliminates proxy dependency of apps and browsers
   • Encourage the selection of resources (tutorials, videos, etc.) which are “device neutral”

Fears

1. Student Monitoring, and Off-Task Behavior
• Begin the discussion now about the impact of more autonomous student work on lesson plan design. Teacher instructional practice is so huge, it gets its own section below, but be aware that a teacher's desire to leave their instructional practice unchanged in the face of omnipresent  information and content creation tools will result in lots of off-task behavior!
• Leverage a Learning Management System to manage links, and monitor student access to materials and activities. "Google" is an instructional resource, but if you want to use and track specific online tools, an LMS can serve as a first-stop portal, and a method of tracking individual student progress.
2. The Scary "Cloud"
   • Make teacher, school, and district online presences interactive. The cloud is about connections. If leadership and classroom presences don't accept and use input from students, it's unlikely teachers will be interested in doing so. 
   • Have teacher participation in crowdsourced knowledge construction and discussion a part of their professional responsibilities. It should be a quid quo pro -- require it, but acknowledge its importance by awarding professional development credit for it!

Instructional Practice

1. The  disappearing lecture 
• Start the move away from the teacher role of information deliverer (“Sage on the Stage”), and towards facilitation (”Guide on the Side”). 
• Find and leverage online materials, media, and experts. The teacher role becomes more than simply selecting the content. S/he now has the ability to select the resources which deliver it. 
• Examine the "Flipped Classroom" concept, which leverages class time for tutorials, mentoring, and answering questions.
2. Differentiation
   • BYOD supports an increased focus on project-based learning and collaborative learning, which  also supports a better reflection of differentiation strategies.
   • Promote a classroom practice which supports a variety of activities at once, including an increase in student autonomy. Start now to get away from the idea that all students have to be doing the same thing at the same time!
3. Assessment and Accountability
   
   • Increase the use of online and electronic assessments, especially for formative purposes. Online assessments can be accomplished at any time, and can be used as instructional platforms. Electronic ("clicker") assessments can be used to drive the classroom.
   • Add changes in teacher’s instructional practice to teacher accountability processes. Student learning accountable measures are important, but don't get at the kinds of changes needed to drive them in the new environment.

Fairness

1. Access to Devices
• Provide small numbers of student-use classroom computers for projects which require them. This can help to support projects that a student's device might not be able to handle, and provides access for students who might not have support for out-of-class work.
• As much as possible, purchase and make available devices to take home for students who do not have anything they can use there. The goal of BYOD is a 1-1 classroom access paradigm on the cheap. True 1-1 requires support for students who cannot afford hardware themselves. (Accessing online resources might imply the use of textbook funds for delivery devices.)
2. The “Digital Divide” (broadband access outside of school)
   
   • Expand alternative access through ESS/extended school library hours, and community partners such as city libraries and businesses. The goal here is to get all students to learn how to use these new capabilities for learning...wherever they are!
   • Connect to parents through the Acceptable Use Policy process. Make sure they support your interests, and provide the ability for them to participate.

This last point is pivotal. Although BYOD can help schools change to a more connected learning experience, it isn't "free lunch." We still have a responsibility to serve ALL students, regardless of what resources and abilities they bring to the classroom. But even if we can't fully-fund such support, changing to the new learning environment is most important to our students without home access. If we do not support these experiences for them, the result is a reinforcement of the divide between the haves and the have-nots!

The Catch-22 of Technology-Driven Learning

       I have a new tablet – a Samsung Galaxy Tab. I really like it. It has a lot of the things I’m familiar with, including full file access to the Flash memory. So, if I want to read something using Amazon’s Kindle reader app, it’s as simple as dropping the file into the Kindle folder. Otherwise, its user interface is virtually indistinguishable from the iPad it replaced – another familiarity plus.
       But enough about my toys.
       I’m finding that a smooth transition between technology changes is a very good thing for me. I’ve spent much of the last 20 years trying to keep up with trends and changes, and I must say my taste for it is beginning to wane a bit. That, of course, makes me a little bit more like the overwhelming majority of the teachers I support, which might be a good thing. After all, the technology early adopters tend to look askance at those who can’t (or are unwilling to) keep up, which does bad things on both sides – it tends to foster a distorted sense of power and gatekeeping amongst the early adopters, and a sense of powerlessness and neglect amongst everybody else. There’s a lot of research on this issue. It’s definitely not new, it’s just gotten worse as the pace of change increases.
       They say, of course, that comfort with unfamiliarity is a good thing. I watched a TED Talk by social studies teacher Diana Laufenberg titled “How to learn? From mistakes,” a wonderful collection of instructional vignettes which brings together a lot of the project-based learning ideas my colleagues and I have been promoting for a long time: digital storytelling, collaborative projects, multiple modes of expression, student-driven learning and decision-making. Her point is that, with the shift away from educators and schools as the sole sources of information (any smart phone can provide more information than any teacher), we have to work out a better role for ourselves. And, of course, the above list provides the hints. Underlying it all is this idea that learning actually happens through failure, not success. That is, we grow by engaging in a series of unfamiliar experiences, learning from our mistakes.
       One might say that this is a very good argument for being a technology early adopter, and we should push those who aren’t in that category, to join it.
       But I suspect most people’s ability to negotiate unfamiliarity can be stretched only so far. Hence, learning-through-technology advocates might run the risk of squandering that ability to stretch in the pursuit of tools, rather than ideas. Once again, we’ve run the risk of putting the cart before the horse, technology goals ahead of educational goals, giving fuel to the argument that too much attention to technology tools slows, rather than enhances, learning. This is, of course, why so-called intelligent classroom tools have made such inroads into classroom practice – these tools do not require teachers to change their practice one whit, so they must meet and overcome only one arena of unfamiliarity. But that pretty much misses the implication of access to information, Ms. Laufenberg’s primary point, and mine.
       So how do we beat this rap? Taking a page from intelligent classroom tool integration, the goal is to reduce the amount of unfamiliarity, and we can do that by simply ignoring the tools. Do we need the latest tablet, cloud computing tool, media editor, etc., to implement student-driven, project-based learning? Certainly not. That’s a change that has its own merits, and we can advocate it without running the risk of giving ordinary classroom teachers the Catch 22 of requiring them to embrace new classroom habits only when and if they will use and embrace the tools we have designed to support it.
       But doesn’t that defeat the point? Not necessarily. In most settings, access to tools and technology resources is, for the most part, set by district and school policies rather than integration strategies. Most students already have the exposure and skillset they need to leverage the tools, as long as they have access. Hence, it isn’t necessary for the classroom teacher to have mastered the tools. They only need to allow for their use. That might, of course, be pretty scary too, but it’s a great deal less scary than requiring them to be in charge of teaching to, and providing, the tools themselves.
       Of course, the appropriate use of tools is something that a teacher can’t completely ignore. But the overwhelming majority of these concerns are (or at least should be!) already on their plates. Distracted and off-task behavior, critical thinking and evaluating the credibility of resources, etc. – are all things that scare teachers from allowing tech tool use, but those issues aren’t new, or even radically different, from those needed in an ordinary library.
       It’s time to cut our teachers a little slack. Instead of requiring them to embrace tool use as a metaphor for instructional reform, we should allow them the luxury of addressing the reform directly. I, for one, am willing to do that, knowing full well that, within a few short years, I’ll probably be one of those for whom some slack is required.

Would You Buy a Used Car from this App?

       With Facebook's IPO already in the wild (and apparently not doing that well), I am prompted to look at how its heavily-analyzed and second-guessed business plan might fit into the social history of homo sapiens. 

       I will admit to a little Facebook participation, though, as you might infer from the title of this blog, I’m not much of a fan of “sound-byte” platforms which celebrate the short quip over the thoughtful analysis. I square that circle by using Facebook primarily as a method of keeping up with my family, and a short list of friends I like and respect.
       Recently, I noted an article posted by one of those friends, about the “un-friending” trend on Facebook (and Facebook’s attempts to stem that tide through redesign), with some interest. There’s a lot happening in Facebook of which I don’t approve, and I must say I’ve un-friended a number of folks in that category. I view this trend as a good thing, in general.
       But this essay isn’t about that.
       When I clicked the Facebook link to the “un-friending trend” article, I was immediately prompted to add a Facebook app which posts back what I’ve read. The article itself was actually hosted on VentureBeat, a technology blog with heavy social networking ties. The app seemed to be branded by The Washington Post (their icon was there), but I could find no other evidence of any association between VentureBeat and The Washington Post. But no matter. What got my attention was the app. If I agreed to its use, it would automatically post back to Facebook the simple fact that I had opened the article. Not that I liked it, not that I agreed with it, not that I thought it was good, not that I even read it…just that I clicked through to it.
       This, of course, is the trend. Facebook wants you to post your location when you’re sitting in a restaurant. It wants you to post your purchase when you go shopping. The underlying assumption is that simple consumption is worth celebrating, worth noting, worth passing as data to someone else…without even the pretense of having actually approved of the restaurant or purchase. The result is a white noise of meaningless data crowding into the same space as the “likes” and forwards.
       There are so many things wrong with this idea that it’s difficult to find where to start. Data does not constitute information. Information does not constitute ideas. Of course, ideas require information, which require data, but the direction of flow here is absolutely critical. Facebook, and just about any smart phone app you can think of that requires access to your GPS, is really only interested in data. It wants you to display where you are, what you’re doing. If you choose to enhance that with what you think about where you are, and what you’re doing, then that’s up to you, and Facebook certainly supports it. But, increasingly and predictably, social networking is being driven not by ideas, or even information…but by plain data.
       Here’s how this is supposed to work. I read something. I’m excited about its ideas. I submit my analysis to a friend who already respects my opinions, and based on that respect, the friend reads the same article. She may or may not be as excited as I was, but she will place what she thinks of the article in the context of how she views me, and my ability to think critically about what I’ve read. In short, she will have taken the time to read the article based on the fact that I read and recommended it. '
       This process reflects the notion that, to select and process information, we need context, and we need help. None of us are stand-alone data processors. We depend on people who know more than we do on a particular subject to help us wade through the data. That’s the true value of a social context for ideas.
       In contrast, automated “I ate at this restaurant” and “I read [i.e. clicked through to] this article” has absolutely no help. It’s all just data, and we’re still on our own deciding if the article is worth the read. Even the person who generated that “read” data didn’t know what the quality was before the Facebook notice appeared. The Internet has done a bang-up job of delivering almost any information to almost anyone. That does not make us all experts. That does not make us all able to negotiate all that information without help.
       All too often, the folks I have decided to un-friend are exactly the ones who send on without thinking the latest political rant, the latest insensitive joke, the latest spin on a celebrity gossip tidbit. Facebook, and those apps on your iPhone, are one step beyond that. I can quickly figure out the folks who mindlessly forward without a critical look,  un-friend them, and stop the stream. But if it's an app, I know nothing about the article, and nothing about the person who supposedly read it, ‘cept that she clicked something Facebook tricked her into clicking. (Who would guess that “cancel” would take you to the article without the post-back?)
       Yes, we need to teach our students how to think critically, how to evaluate ideas and information meaningfully and dependably. Fifty years ago that meant evaluating the people we depended on for ideas. I am absolutely still convinced that the idea of the “expert” is still important, and there’s no way we can negotiate our way through all the data thrown at us without them.
       But one thing’s for certain. A Facebook app will never be one. And with a new, incredible pressure on Facebook to pull data from, and push advertisements to, the massive collection of users it serves, this is going to get worse.
       And especially watch out for apps selling used cars..

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.