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?

Through Bein' Cool: Devo and Motivation

        Yes, that's Devo, the rock group out of Akron, Ohio, famous for "Whip It" and red flower pots for hats. They released an almost intentionally dorky tune (with a matching low-budget video) on their "New Traditionalists" album called "Through Bein' Cool," with advice to all of the strange and misfit teens of the time...

"...If you live in a small town
You might meet a dozen or two
Young alien types who step out
And dare to declare
We're through bein' cool..."

The band was actually pretty serious about the issue of conformity. Their name, Devo, was an intentional play on "de-evolution." It reflected their concern that humanity had actually begun to regress, citing the intense herd mentality of American society (and teens!) as evidence.

       Devo's interest in the effects of conformity were more artistic and satiric, but there is plenty of research out there showing that, in fact, a lack of personal expression and autonomy actually contributes to a variety of physical and psychological problems. Huffington Post blogger and self-styled "work-life balance/stress management trainer" Joe Robinson cites dozens of articles in his blog entry "Don't Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Problem With Being Cool" (Oct. 13, 2010)...

"...Being cool is supposed to make us irresistibly confident in our up-to-the-minute blase-ness, but it actually feeds insecurity with the false belief that popularity or a certain image is needed for validation. The research shows that real self-worth comes from internal goals that satisfy values and needs that are actually your own, such as autonomy and growth, the polar opposite of the external approval circuit..."

       A lot of the "research" underlying these ideas comes from the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, an unlikely pair of social scientists from the University of Rochester, described in some detail in Daniel Pink's new book on motivation in business, Drive. The underlying assumption in business is that the motivation to succeed originates from external sources -- pay bonuses and high salaries, or, alternatively, the threat of sanctions or other deterents. In education, we've built an entire superstructure around this concept, from high-stakes testing and school assessment processes, to teacher merit pay and other performance incentives. None of it, say Deci, Ryan and Pink, works. As a matter of fact, this sort of approach is actually counter-productive, reducing creativity, productivity, and personal satisfaction and happiness.

       I truly celebrate the anytime, any place nature of digital social connections, and they have great implications for how and why we learn. But two recent events have caused me to, once again, ponder whether the tech-focused among us really have a handle on things, or are we just trying to be cool like our kids.

Teachers Weigh In

       "...If we were to offer something significant for a prize, incentive, reward, benefit, etc., what would you like? We are thinking something in the category of a tool or resource that would help your organization be more effective..." ...was a posting to a discussion list of a professional organization to which I belong. When cooler heads finally prevailed, the resultant discussion was quite interesting and revealing. But that had to wait for the chorus of "A new iPad!!!" postings to die down.

A Student's Spin.
       A student taking my online course on open-source web applications -- a pretty powerful and tech-savvy junior who has produced marketable software of his own, and participated in our superintendant's student advisery council on technology in the classroom.-- has often mentioned his lack of interest in the use of smart/personal devices like phones and PDAs. "Real learning" he states "takes place with paper and pencil tasks...games and online activities are just a distraction."

The Results?

       Needless to say, these anecdotes have no obvious connection, and they, even together, prove absolutely nothing of substance about learning and motivation. Despite my high school student's observations, I will, as I mentioned, continue to be an advocate for inexpensive and ubiquitous computing devices, and the connections they bring us. Besides, I suspect that our young spokesman probably will be using such tools to learn and work when he's no longer in high school (if he's not already using them now).
       But the contrast to be gained from their juxtaposition, still, could not be more striking. What the adult members of the discussion list (educators, all) were saying was that a very popular device was a great "...prize, incentive, reward, benefit..." In fact, that's not what research, and our example student, are saying. People (including students) owning the learning process, and owning its results, is how that works. If we want to engage and motivate our students, then we can't assume that access to cool devices will do that for us, and "access to tools" does not, in itself, translate into student ownership of the learning process. It must be a pre-existing lesson design piece, a specific pedagogical decision which does not depend on the physical details of the lesson. It can, in fact, be a part of a paper and pencil lesson.
       Students are kids. They're heavily invested in "being cool," and a lot of that motivation is driving their own use patterns for computers, smart phones, and other such devices. That is exactly what caused my student's observation that interactive games and other computer experiences were a waste of time -- what he saw was students taking those opportunities and abusing them to pursue what was interesting to them. Those use patterns are heavily influenced by their own herd mentality, their own sense of "cool." If a teacher selects a tool, or an online experience, for how much s/he perceives it fits the students' interests (instead of selecting it for how it supports an otherwise strong lesson), that is the results. We have a lot to learn from our students, but, as teachers, we'll always get into trouble simply trying to be like them, trying to motivate them by giving them what we think they think is cool.

       To leverage the true power of online computing and other technology tools, we need to put the flower pots on our heads, and join Devo. Learning is way too important to simply be driven by our desire to fit in -- with each other or our students. It must be driven by our students' desire to learn, to advance, to succeed. And Deci and Ryan tells us that's got to come from within.

"...Time to clean some house,

Be a man, or a mouse....

Put the tape on erase,

Rearrange a face,

We always liked Picasso anyway.

We're through bein' cool..."

Autumn Leaves, Rhubarb, and Student Attention Span

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chickens vs. Eggs

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

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

Who’s Distracted, Really?

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

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

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

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

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

Implied Pedagogy Part 2: To a hammer...

Scenario One:

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

Scenario Two:

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

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

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

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

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

Doers and Watchers: A Tool's Implied Pedagogy

Are you a doer, or a watcher?

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

Are your students doers, or watchers?

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

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

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

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

Are your students doers, or watchers?

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

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

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

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

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

Classroom Response Systems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond Facebook: Social Networking and Learning

Facebook!

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

Social networking!