EdTech Baltimore

by Andrew Coy

As part of the process of extending the digital conversation into the analog world, Shelly and I have been working to put together a local forum in Baltimore to discuss the future of education and technology. The first of the conversations will focus on using social networking to extend, enhance, and influence education.

I will be moderating the conversation with Dave Troy (CEO of 410Labs, creator of Shortmail.com and Twittervision.com), Tom Murdock (co-founder and chief-architect of Moodlerooms) and Shelly Blake-Plock (blogger-in-chief here at TeachPaperless and founder of GrowConnected) as the panelists. The event will be this upcoming Tuesday (the 20th of September) between 6 and 8pm at Digital Harbor High School. We are looking into live streaming the discussion and tweeting it as well. Think of it as an analog parallel of #edchat.

So this is my question to you:

• What questions would you ask? 
• What topics would you want to discuss? 
• What problems should they address?

Make a comment below, follow us on Twitter (@EdTechBaltimore), visit our website (http://www.edtechbaltimore.org), join our mailing list -- help spread the word from the digital to the analog and back again.

From Egypt To The Classroom. When Is Our Revolution?

by Steven W. Anderson

It has been an interesting past few weeks around the world. First the govenerment in Tunisia was brought down. Then a similar situation in Egypt. And now people are taking to the streets in Bahrain, Iran and other places. For whatever the reason the people in these countries were upset with their government and protest to the point where they brought down governments, some that had been in place for 30+ years.

Now, I am not a political expert. I don't know each situation and why the people where unhappy. I have some knowledge but I don't want to speculate. But I do know that there is one common thread in each of these situations that is worth taking a look at.

Social Media

On Sunday 60 Minutes profiled the man credited with starting the revolution in Egypt. Wael Ghorim works for Google and started a Facebook page for Egyptians to post their experiences with police. And it is from that Facebook page and from Twitter posts organize protests that topiled a government. It was a great interview and you can watch it below.



The events in Tunisia, Iran, Bahrain, and other places and trace their beginnings to the use of social media by the residents in those countries. Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites allowed residents to organize in non-traditional ways to get their message out. Many of the governments don't know how to handle these new voices, so they knee-jerk react, send out the military to quiet the crowds. But they just get louder and louder and larger and larger. And in the case of Egypt and Iran, they attempted to keep control by shutting down Internet traffic for several days.

Any of this sound familiar?

Leadership is afraid of a new medium and how powerful it is. So they put up blocks, downplay it's effectiveness, and bury their heads in the proverbial sand.

When is our revolution in education when it comes to Social Media and the use of these tools in the classroom? Think about how powerful it could be if students in a high school social studies class in Nebraska could look at the Facebook page started by Wael. But, they can't because the district feels Facebook is a time suck, provides no educational value and they block it.

Or what about being able to look at the Tweets organizing the protests and have a discussion about why the people in these places feel the way they do and how their situations compare to those locally and nationally.

Those of us who know the power of Social Media and the value it can provide to learning are, sometimes, seen in the same way as many of the organizers of these revolutions. We are disruptive. We want to destroy the current system. Really? We just want change. We understand how these tools can be used to enhance, change and ultimately make learning better for students.

Maybe it is wrong of me to compare these events in these countries where many of the citizens have been mistreated for many, many years. But again, isn't the same true for our kids? Sitting in rows, drill and kill, teaching in isolation. Maybe that is mistreatment....

What do you think? When is our education revolution? Are their parallels? Or are the situations different? Leave some comments below.

Five C's of Multimedia Mastery

by John T. Spencer

"You know Ed Hardy t-shirts are just really bad tattoo art with a Bedazzler," a student comments.

Minutes later, a kid says. "Did you know that they used to have a haircutter that you could attach to your vacuum?  I saw it on YouTube.  It's hilarious."

"You know that you can watch Alf reruns on YouTube?" another kid says.

Later that day, when students hear a Ray LaMontagne song, a kid recognizes his voice.  "Hey, that's the white guy who sang the song 'Crazy.'  I saw it on my friend's myspace." (Apparently myspace is still pretty popular with low-income youth).

My students piece together pop culture in a never-ending collage.  I tell a kid that something isn't her fault and five people are quoting "Stewie, it's not your fault," from Family Guy. I mention North Korea and students show me a Facebook fan page for their dictator.  When I taught the American Revolution, I had a student show me a Social Media Guide to the Revolution, showing how it would look with Paul Revere on Twitter.

My students have a ton of information. Nothing shocking there.  They piece together shards of satire from television, converse about it on Facebook, create their own parodies with cell phones and then post them on YouTube.  They ping pong back and forth between facts.  And yet . . .

My students arrive in my class with almost no critical thinking.  The tools they've used to access information have made them brilliant collage artists and pop culture snobs, however they have rarely ventured beyond entertainment.  True, they can find satire and yes, they can reference a decent joke.  However, most of them fail to use information for anything more than a joke or a conversation point.

So, for the love of all things alliterated, I'm tossing out 5 C's of Multimedia Mastery:

Context: I want students to understand the context of information.  Yes, it's neat that they can quote an obscure line from Alf.  However, do they understand the context of the eighties?  Do they get what it was like to be in the waning years of the Cold War?  I want them to use media to find the context, to understand the space.  As they approach a video or a website, I want them to think about the sense of space and time that have been chipped away by media.

Creativity: I want my students to use media for creative purposes.  By this, I don't simply mean piecing together other people's work, either.  I want them to write original blog posts, create and share concept maps, record their own podcasts and spend some time creating decent video. If media is supposed to be democratic and social, I want my students to get beyond entertainment and start using a medium to compose something original.

Critical Thinking:  I want students to think critically about the information online.  This means they need to learn to ask deeper inquiry questions, analyze the bias of a source, differentiate between fact and opinion and make connections that aren't instantly noticeable.  It also means they need to critique the medium itself.

Civics:  The revolution in Tunisia was essentially a social media revolution. The same is true of the protests in Iran. Sadly, our schools often block the very media that helped launch democracy in other nations? I want my students to use media to express their social voice and to engage in a civic dialog.  I want them to question whether Twitter is right for keeping WikiLeaks' account information private.  It's a powerful thing when students use media to access public files, ask questions to public leaders and speak out for what they believe.

Conversation:  I want students to understand that there is a social element to social media and that the best way for them to have a holistic, contextual understanding of their world is through real-life conversations.  Kids come to media (even social media) with a sense that it's not real.  I want them to recover the human side of it.  How can they engage in media in a way that broadens worldviews and helps them to see that there are multiple perspectives?

The Social Alma Mater

Over the past week and a half, I've had several great conversations with former students... especially recent grads. By-and-large these students and I have kept up our friendships via social media.

@schickbob and I were talking about this today and came to the conclusion that -- in a way -- the future of education is bound up in the ways that we relate to our alumni via the social connections of the Net. Because the future of education isn't about the classroom; it's about the world. And your alumni are the bridge between the two.

With that in mind... if any old alums happen to be reading this, do get in touch. We need you now more than ever.

Dealing with 'Friends': Using Multiple Feeds to Separate Personal and Professional

Kax has got questions about what to do when a student starts following your Twitter feed. Check out his post and the comment discussion that follows.

Personally, this hasn't been a problem for me.

I've got several Twitter, FB, Delicious, YouTube, etc... accounts. They are set up for a variety of both personal and professional uses (education PLN / music / family / and more). My high school students understand that while they are welcome to contact me through my professional 'classroom' feeds, I will refrain from accepting and/or block 'em from my personal feeds.

Seems like good rule of thumb in dealing with minors as well as a way to teach kids that there are different uses for different social media.

The Safety Net

Sorry to be coy (or weirdly hyperbolic) in my last post. 'Twas written in the heat of the moment.

Without going into detail, let's just say that I've got a student whose academic career may have been saved precisely because he was using social media.

This is so diametrically opposed to what all the naysayers told us back in the days of fear.

What's that you say? Your school's still afraid of social tech?

Well, I promise you things are changing.

This thing that came up yesterday was the third case I've heard of in the last three weeks from two different schools about the transparent nature of social tech saving a kid's hide.

I'm starting to think of the Net as a 'Safety Net'.

An example from a teacher at nearby school: student writes self-destructive comment on FB that two peers screenshot and send to guidance office. The student winds up getting help.

I remember the days when some folks were talking about disciplinary action for kids caught using social media. The days when we were afraid of what sorts of pictures our kids might post and what kinds of things they might say about us.

The days before we started to teach them digital health and the days before we started to expect them to uphold standards of digital citizenship.

What's that you say? Your school's not there yet?

Well, I promise you: it will be. Because it will have to be. We can't allow students to live in a digital world and fail to teach them how to treat one another in it.

Because social media is what you make it. It can be a place full of meanness and rants. Or it can be a place of community where our goal is to help one another out.

Judging by comparing my Twitter PLN to the posts that come through via some of the trending topics, it's obvious that the good and bad exist side-to-side. It's up to us as teachers to start tipping the scale in the direction of the good.

And we do that by teaching.

Because, fundamentally, the future starts in our classrooms.

Hate seeing offensive trash on the Net? Well, then teach your kids to treat one another with respect. Teach them that only weak souls trash the opinions of others whilst wearing the veil of anonymity.

I'm not completely naive. I'm a high school teacher; I've seen my fair share of what we might consider 'poor decisions' with regard to social tech. But I've also seen the good. And whether it's the case of my student getting the chance to get back on track and not ruin his hopes of going to college or that other student getting the help needed to deal with some serious issues, it was social media that worked as the conduit for the intervention.

After all, social media is just a reflection of us. If we are considerate and compassionate folks, then the social media landscape will be that much more compelling. Whereas if we deny it or walk away from it, the social media landscape will become far worse than YouTube's flame wars already portray it as.

Social media. It's what you make it. It can even be a safety net.

From the PLN: Teachers Speaking out on Social Media

A number of readers wrote back concerning our recent discussion of PLNs and social tech for professional development.

Reader Shaken writes:

I'm a new teacher (just into my second year) and have found the three months using a PLN of more value than my entire time at Uni. To have the knowledge, expertise, experience, ideas and thoughts of innovative educators at my fingertips is incredible. I am learning so quickly and have now found myself teaching my colleagues.

Reader Mel writes:

I'm currently trying to change my PLN behaviour.

For years I've been a lurker. I've read edublogs, been on Ning and been following my twitter feed. Now I'm attempting to be apart of the voice out there and I think what you're saying here is a big part of that but in reverse.

I've been following others but not giving of myself and is that fair either, no. I have something to contribute to help the network work better. Also, by doing so the network is making more of an impact on me.

Another reader commented on the changing nature of teaching itself in light of social media. Here's a particularly prescient selection from a well considered argument.

Reader Seth writes:

But there's another level to all of this that is worth thinking about: educating teachers to educate their students in public exposes the foibles of the students (directly) and of the teacher (at least indirectly, and sometimes directly) to public scrutiny. It's scary business. It requires some very real confidence in yourself as a person and as a teacher to be able to not know something in public -- or to correct a mistake in public.

For many teachers faced with social media, I think this is part of the very real threat that they feel: they are turning their classrooms open to (potentially judgmental) strangers -- and ceding centerstage, and ceasing to be the expert, but instead being a learner with their students.

It's big stuff, and technology is a symptom, and not the disease. In almost every case where we talk about technological issues, what we're getting at are fundamental questions of pedagogy and philosophy. The technology just exposes some of these more-buried issues.

Social Technology in Education Lesson Plan Wiki

Seeking teachers to submit content to the new Social Technology in Education Lesson Plan Wiki!

There are so many fresh approaches being taken to the integration of social and participatory media in education, I thought it would be a useful thing to have a practitioner-created resource full of lesson plans demonstrating the best practices in social tech enhanced teaching.

Feel free to submit content and ideas. It's a wiki... you can't mess it up. Experiment, mash it up, get some thoughts out there, and let's put together a nice free and collaborative resource.

Social Technology and Education Conference: Aug 14th

Will be headed to Massachusetts in August for the 'Social Technology and Education' one day conference at Harvard. Looking forward to it as I haven't been back up in the Boston area in a few years and have some dear friends to catch up with.

Here's a link to the conference info site and here's a blurb explaining what's going on:

This conference is a free one-day event where attendees can learn about how social technologies can be used to create and support communities of learning. Anyone who works in education or is interested in learning more about these technologies, and how they can be used in high schools, colleges, and universities. Students can also attend if they want to listen or be on a panel talking about social tools.

I plan to be presenting a short workshop on using Twitter in the classroom. It will cover using Twitter and several Tweet apps to create personalized collaborative reference bibliographies, using Twitter in real-time mentoring, and using Twitter as an assessment tool in the classroom.

New Research on the Social Media Attitudes of Teachers

So you wanted some new research on the attitudes of teachers towards social media?

Well, here you go; courtesy of IssueLab, WGBH Educational Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Education Development Center's Center for Children and Technology.

IssueLab, by the way, is my new favorite thing on the Internets. I have just signed up as a Lab Rat.

From the Archives: Social Media and Cheating

Originally posted April 30, 2009


Reader MagistraM writes:

I love how you have placed the responsibility for learning so clearly on your students. A common concern about using digital tools for classwork and assessments is that the students will be "cheating". This lesson demonstrates how the social tools facilitate every student's learning - and demands each student to contribute.

I would say that social media actually may present us with a new post-cheating paradigm. I liken it to students in an oil painting class: barring having someone else do it for you, you just "can't" cheat on an oil painting.

Because of the transparency of Web 2.0, cheating in the traditional forms -- plagiarism, copying, cribnotes -- is severely limited in a practical sense. Because of the individuality and personalization of assessment and creation via Web 2.0, cheating itself becomes a rather uninteresting option.

Students tend to cheat out of a mix of boredom and procrastination; cheating is a manifestation of a lack of motivation to be authentic -- whether we're talking about the total slacker who cut-and-pastes from Encarta, or the 'sophisticated' cheater who tries to juke the SAT.

Unauthentic assessment will produce cheaters.

And what is unauthentic assessment? I'd define it as assessment that fails in its structural makeup to address the realities of society -- both at a local and global level.

Now, I'm no spring chicken. I know there are kids who will try to cheat their way around anything. I've caught a few in my own classes. But, if the teacher is using the tools available to engage the students rather than just to talk 'at' them, the teacher has got a much better shot of fostering the type of community in the classroom where cheating will not be tolerated among the students themselves. Web 2.0, by its very nature is a medium that requires you to give of yourself to get anything in return. And that's the sort of thing that a good teacher can tap into both to encourage authentic engagement as well as to foster a spirit of classroom-wide local goodwill. Combined, cheating becomes a much less cool option.

Does Arne Get It?

Digital Education reports on a new report released by US Dept of Ed which suggests that 'blended learning' is more effective than strictly face-to-face or strictly online learning.

Despite the fact that, as Dig Ed notes, little to none of the research looked specifically at K-12 learning, I'm willing to barter that the gist of it is right. 'Blended' or 'Hybrid' learning merging digital and f2f has been my go-to for the last two years and I couldn't imagine running a successful paperless classroom any other way.

But that's not the end of the story.

Because also in the article hangs a bit of low-lying fruit in the form of a response to the report by Arne Duncan:

“This new report reinforces that effective teachers need to incorporate digital content into everyday classes and consider open-source learning management systems, which have proven cost effective in school districts and colleges nationwide.”

Problem is: it doesn't seem like the Secretary of Education has any clue what he's talking about.

Teachers don't need to incorporate 'digital content' into anything. You don't teach 'digital content' in a paperless English class; you teach 'English language and literature content' via digital alternatives to paper. You don't teach 'digital content' in a paperless art history class; you teach the content of art history via digital means.

Via the integration of technology, students learn vital networking, communication, and participatory media skills; but this isn't the content of the course.

If anything, in a fully integrated Web 2.0 classroom, it is the students who are creating 'digital content'.

Furthermore, 'open-source' learning doesn't require any management system. You don't need to spend any money on a management system. Nor do you need to spend any money on textbooks. Rather, just spend your money on smart teachers who are savvy enough to know how to put together the content of an authentic course by compiling open-source materials, creating engaged and vigorous lesson plans, and integrating a sophisticated use of social media tools.

Get it?

[Add 6:40PM - My original title for this post was 'Is Arne Duncan a Luddite?' but I decided to pull that. Because Arne obviously is not a Luddite. It's not that he doesn't like or dislike technology. It's that he doesn't understand what's going on. He just doesn't get it. -- Shelly]

Social Media and Digital Portfolios for College Admissions

With regard to turning in digital portfolios as a part of college admissions, a reader asks:

How do college admissions officers know the authenticity and validity of these "digital" portfolios. How do I know who the work is from?

The portfolios I am describing are actually the product of four years of the student's classroom and coursework engagement with social media integrated across the high school curriculum.

In other words, the portfolio would consist of the student's four-year blog -- which among other things would include blog post editions of all graded writing and daily work in all disciplines -- as well as the student's social bookmarks, videos and other multi-media, and a variety of participatory media projects that would demonstrate creativity, task determination, and intellectual aptitude in ways that SATs and exam scores just can't.

The validity of the portfolio can easily be weighed up against four years worth of work. In other words, the portfolio would not represent some sort of 'capstone' project, but rather would be an honest reflection of four years of formative development.

Because the majority of the work represented by this portfolio will have been completed within the context of classwork and learning and because the tools used in creating the portfolio are authentic Web 2.0 public tools, there is little threat to the 'rigging' of the portfolio by the student -- time stamps, cross-Web intertextuality, and just plain ongoing teacher assessment of the student's involvement in the daily creation and documentation of a learning portfolio contribute to the authenticity.

I'm not talking about students submitting their MySpace pages to college admissions. I'm talking about students submitting portfolios which demonstrate readiness for college by representing four years of the full application of integrated social media tools in the day-to-day coursework of the student.

Reminder: This Week's Friday Chat Topic -- Professional Development for Educators: What's Social Media Got to Do With It?

The Friday Chat -- 1PM EST -- June 26th
Professional Development for Educators: What's Social Media Got to Do With It?

We'll be talking about the (nearly) 101 ways in which social media provides for more meaningful professional development for teachers and ultimately what that means for our students and the the classroom experience.

The Friday Chat: Hosted by TeachPaperless every Friday at http://todaysmeet.com/teachpaperless

This Week's Friday Chat - Professional Development for Educators: What's Social Media Got to Do With It?

By special request, this week's Friday Chat will be on the topic:

Professional Development for Educators: What's Social Media Got to Do With It?

We'll be talking about the (nearly) 101 ways in which social media provides for more meaningful professional development for teachers and ultimately what that means for our students and the the classroom experience.

The Friday Chat: Hosted by TeachPaperless every Friday at http://todaysmeet.com/teachpaperless

Social Media in Pakistan

Twitterer @josiefraser turned me on to an article posted back in February by Henry Jenkins. It's a piece looking at Huma Yusuf's work on the role of social media in Pakistan.

Well worth a look by educators looking for more authentic analysis of social media to put in their intellectual arsenal against the forces of blocking. I've saved it and commented on a few parts via Diigo.

Real Time Learning

A reader writes:

I know my students are always asking "why am I learning this". With social media as the initial introduction, they might never ask that question again. Things are happening in the "real" world in "real" time. They will see the need for educating themselves.

They will see the need if we model it to them. That's part of what it takes to be a 21st century teacher: you must model authentic and connected real-time learning.

The Revolution Will Be Complementary?

Ethan Zuckerman has got a piece on protest and social media that's required reading over at ...My Heart's in Accra.

The use of social media for protest - especially to promote a protest to international audiences - is far from unique.

Hmm... I'm interested. Do tell.

I’ve been asking some of the reporters I’ve spoken with where they were on other recent social media and protest stories. Citizen media has emerged as one of the key spaces for journalism in Fiji in the wake of a coup government that’s censoring mainstream media. It’s been a key source of information in Madagascar as that country’s suffered through a violent change of government. (One reporter who I mentioned this to remarked that Madagascar was “just a speck of an island somewhere”. That speck is twice the size of Great Britain and has the population of Australia…) In Guatemala, online media publicized the assasination of a lawyer by forces close to the president… and government authorities began arresting people for twittering the story to amplify it. These weren’t huge stories for most newspapers - the Iran story is huge not because of the social media aspect, but because protests in Iran are a huge story independent of citizen media.

In all these cases, it looks like the real role of social media is in amplifying the story to a broader audience. In a sense, that is the current role of social media in the synergy with established traditional media which we described yesterday.

The shift is that through critical mass, social media is now able to make the stories we used to tell around the kitchen table or at the corner bar now available immediately as a primary source to the world's media.

So, the stories themselves are going to have a different feel or focus.

In a way, as a musician, I can't help but see in the amateur video coming from the streets of Tehran the same sort of ethos that was present and has been instrumental in the lo-fi and documentary movements in audio recording. It's about getting the moment on tape, all else be damned.

In a way, it's a perfect complement to the remarkable on-the-street professional reporting of pros like Roger Cohen whose recent NY Times Op-Ed is one of the best pieces of writing I've read in ages.

How about: "The Revolution Will Be Complementary"?

***

I agree with Zuckerman that the Iran story is huge not because of social media as the focus but because it's a big story regardless.

However, the secondary impact is that the Iran story is in fact a big story for social media. In reality, the biggest yet.

Perhaps even, the game changer.

Summer Assignment for Teachers

Here's a list of 5 things you can do over the summer to prepare your paperless classroom for the new school year.

1. Start a blog. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do. You have something to say. So say it. Say more of it everyday. A blog is the hub around which a paperless classroom rotates. The more comfortable you are at blogging and reading blogs, the more comfortable you will be teaching in a paperless classroom.

2. Start a Diigo account. I've been following the Diigo-ing and Diigo-speak of many folks and finally decided to take the plunge myself. I plan on spending all summer learning everything I can about how to use social bookmarking. And in the fall, I am going to make it a mandatory practice for students in my classes.

3. Tweet, Tweet, Tweet. Forget what everybody has told you about Twitter. Forget everything you've read about it. Hype is hype is hype. Just sign up, follow some ed techies, and enter a new world. It will prove to be a Professional Development experience unlike any other. You will kick yourself for not having signed up earlier.

4. Follow the debates concerning traditional media and social media. As regular readers know, this is something which has very much been on my mind lately. My current thinking is this: the #IranElection feed changed everything. It didn't 'replace' mainstream media, rather it forced a critical eye onto the inherent problems within it. And -- most importantly -- in a way that took popular imagination by storm. Are professional journalists necessary? Absolutely. But are the top-down corporate organizations which provide them with jobs singularly necessary? That's the question that's up in the air. That's a question they are asking in Seattle. And in Boston. And in Chicago. And in Baltimore. What's the future of media? Well, I think the type of synergy we've seen in the last eight days between professional savvy and amateur ingenuity marks the way forward. Because the best thing that that synergy can create is a more engaged citizenry; and the more engaged the citizenry, the higher the quality of the output of social media. We have the opportunity here to organize and educate a more sophisticated and engaged society.

5. Prepare your talking points. There are two major obstacles to starting any paperless movement: blocking and access. The events of the last days, as well as the plethora of examples of Twitter in the classroom that have been popping up across the blogosphere, should aid in bolstering your arguments against the former. As for the latter, it is our duty as educators and citizens to advocate for free universal Wi-Fi and universal mobile hardware in all of our schools and public libraries. Movements in major cities such as Philadelphia and Minneapolis have demonstrated that universal Wi-Fi does not have to be a dream. The dropping of the prices of Netbooks and Smart Phones below the cost of textbooks has mooted the cost argument; now it's just a matter of the allocation of resources and the educating of teachers in how to best use this stuff.

Have a fun, safe, and productive summer. There's plenty to learn between now and the new school year.

Quick Change

Noam Cohen with a sober look at Twitter.

Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn’t caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it sure helped.

Both reasonable in tone and revolutionary in the sense that this is hardly what we would have expected the Times to have said about social networking back in the silly days of MySpace.

A lot has changed over the past two years. Time to take it all in and process.