EdTechTrek

What did your child do at school today?

In a recent news report from the UK, an informal poll uncovered that students at UK laptop schools are spending class/lesson time on social network sites.

“Global Secure Systems (GSS) – “an IT security consultancy, has uncovered the alarming reality that UK school children are studying social networking websites during their lessons instead of what they should be concentrating on. In its survey, conducted through Facebook, to discover just how widespread the issue of children visiting sites of this nature at inappropriate times is, a staggering 52 per cent of the 1000 children aged between 13 and 17 who participated, confessed that they did so during lessons. Over a quarter admitted they were doing so for in excess of 30 minutes a day!”

And then, another issue is raised in this article:

“Kids are potentially wasting as much as two and a half hours a week of lessons on Facebook. I recognise that there is a place for social networking, with a whole new generation now relying on it to communicate, but not at the expense of an education. Schools could learn a lesson from industry and ensure school children productively use the internet. Through the deployment of software, access to inappropriate websites can either be completely blocked, or limited to break time, economically and efficiently.”

And then finally…

“In a separate GSS poll, conducted with Infosecurity Europe 2008, it discovered that the recent popularity of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, is costing UK corporations close to £6.5 billion annually in lost productivity. GSS itself as a company recently clamped down on social networking during working hours. When faced with the need for additional bandwidth, David Hobson their MD, analysed why and discovered that by simply restricting the times that sites of this nature could be accessed to lunchtimes and after close of business there was no longer the need to increase bandwidth and so saved thousands of pounds.”

So, here’s what I have been thinking about lately in relation to this. It is no doubt that filtering at school is problematic. Sites teachers and students need are often blocked. There is a great deal of red tape in order to get needed sites unblocked. Some sites never get unblocked because the powers on high decide that they are not worthy of being unblocked. Blocking of needed sites and reasonable keyword searches severely interferes with learning on a day to day basis. It interferes with teachers trying to use current and valuable resources in their classrooms. If forces unreasonable planning in order to get needed sites unblocked before they are to be used in the classroom. It undermines just-in-time use of Internet resources. And, it communicates to teachers that they are not professional enough to manage filter settings on their own. I am sure that there are other issues at play here.

But, the business world has had to check employee personal use of network usage due to loss in productivity. A great deal of on-the-clock time has been wasted on personal Internet usage and communication (browsing, email, video, booking trips, making personal purchases….). I have no doubt that employers have every right to make sure that their employees are spending their paid time working for the employer and not conducting personal business. And, as David Hobson suggests, it would be fine for employers to pause such restriction during lunch times and after hours. Yet Clarence Fisher over on Remote Access has a recent post about Google successfully allowing its employees 10-20% of their job time to persue their own interests and what if we did this similar thing in education. However, this is different from “class time” where students do have specific tasks to be attending to. It is interesting to consider, nonetheless.

So, is it then acceptable to do the same in education? It it acceptable for students to shun instructional and learning time in lieu of personal network communication and browsing… regardless of the reason?? Would parents support such decisions? Would it be acceptable for an employee to rationalize such wasted productivity time with the reason that they were not particularly engaged in their work and were not really enjoying the tasks that were set before them to accomplish?

Now, I am not in any way excusing poor instruction or lack of relevant learning opportunities in classrooms. I am not excusing the lack of vision and creativity that often occurs. However, I do feel that students are losing their ability to attend to verbal information and to complete tasks that perhaps are not of their preference. Of course, this is nothing new. There have always been students who doodle, pass notes, daydream, and have bad attitudes when they are not particularly engaged in the learning tasks set for them. And, teachers are obligated to read such behavior and body language and adapt their instruction so that they are meeting the needs of their students. But, the “discipline of learning” (see Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death) seems to be undermined as students have unfettered access to Internet resources during instructional time. There have been countless reports by educators at all levels on this topic (laptops in the classroom/lecture hall), so I am not going to summarize all of those here. Due to this issue, guidelines are being established my many institutions.

My question is this, though. What is the balance point between effective teaching along with expectations for student learning and excusing students’ lack of ability to learn, be interested and attend (drifting off into cyberspace instead) - on learning that does not meet their “style” or interest level? At what point do we expect students to learn content and learn it in ways that those with experience know (teachers) are still very valuable, but perhaps not so sexy or appealing… and just plain hard work? I am not talking about differentiation, learning styles or multiple intelligences here. I think sometimes we are communicating that if we are not using podcasts, blogs, wikis, laptops, and the like… that we somehow cannot be effective teachers - that students will choose to ignore us if we don’t use the tools that they like. Again, I am not arguing against the use of these tools and their related practices… I support them wholeheartedly. But when students cannot sit and listen to an intelligent, developmentally appropriate and compelling (and I stress all three of these attributes) “lecture” and take an active part in related discussion (or even pose relevant questions) for more than a few minutes without losing interest or comprehension, then perhaps the tools and media that “speak to them” so much are actually diminishing their capacity to think and learn at more abstract levels. Are these students truly multitaskers who can have 2 or more tasks going on simultaneously (listening and answering email for example) while achieving a level of excellence on all of them? Or, is quality somehow compromised as a result of the multitasking (like the inability to seriously consider what is being discusses and participate in discussion and question generation)? Personally, some of the “backchanneling” that I have been a part of has either been a distraction to fully listening to the presenter or a distraction due to the tangential and even off-topic chatter going on. Of course, there has also been some great backchanneling as well. Would we accept off-task backchanneling in our classrooms? We don’t in the physical sense. So, should we in the virtual sense? Is student lack of interest and inability to attend ALWAYS the product of poor teaching? Sorry for the rhetorical question here.

Anyway, at the risk of being called an technological heretic, these are all of the issues that this article brought to mind for me. Sorry for the rambling nature of the post. I am certainly not arguing against technological and educational innovation, creativity, and socially-mediated meaning-making. I just don’t think that the issues around education, filtering, new tools, network access, and cultural shifts are all that simple. We are quick to blame teachers who are not adapting quickly enough. But could it be that this type of shift is much messier, harder to make and more complex than others? Please set me straight if I am way off here.

This morning I read an article from the HeraldNews online titled, Future of education on display at school. It writes about how a laptop program has ‘transformed’ teaching and learning at this parochial girls’ school. It describes how students are benefitting from greater on-demand access to information, are taking notes digitally from text projected on a screen, how teachers are able to cover curriculum more quickly, and how math and science instruction is benefitting from 3-D modeling and virtual manipulation. The report also discusses how student engagement and enthusiasm have increased and does not deny the presence of a few distractions due to the new tool. As I read the article I acknowledged that these are all typical observations from a budding laptop program and that nothing really revolutionary in terms of learning was going on. However, students and teachers alike go through stages of adoption (at different speeds, no doubt) and one cannot expect radical transformations in learning overnight. But, the real kicker though was that there was the conception that having laptops and being able to access content online was the “future of education”. That’s where I let out a frustrated sigh. It is still about being good information consumers (important nonetheless). The article concludes with this quotation from an individual not connected with the school:

“The goal is for students to really recognize that you’re in an ongoing conversation with people all over the world … and then to contribute their own ideas to that conversation.”

Yes, Bravo! But, this was not happening anywhere in the school as described in this article. My question is, who needs more assistance in recognizing the power of conversation, creation and contribution of knowledge here? The students or the teachers? How can the students realize this potential when the teachers do not? Professional development really needs to move in this direction, beyond the mechanical to the powerful. Schools need to embrace powerful and meaningful learning through technology and FREE teachers from so many obstacles that continue to fetter them. Only then will we experience the ‘future of education’. For now, let’s be careful not to call digital 18th century modes of learning the ‘future of education’.

Here is yet more news report of frustrated professors having a difficult time figuring out what to do when technology enters the classroom. Often, the ’solution’ is to ban them from the classroom, as some professors at this particular university are doing. Other institutions have done the same thing. I struggle with this as well, as I teach college students, often in a computer lab full of computers. We talk about the arrangement and type of computers condusive to a collaborative community in the classrom. I like to be able to see everyone’s computer screen rather than have rows of monitors that serve as walls between me and the students. It just makes things easier for me. It also makes things easier for the students, who are able to share with their peers more easily and are able to group in flexible ways in the classroom. Laptops make this even easier to achieve. However, when desks are in rows and students are all facing the lecturer who is lecturing… and laptop screens are up, fingers are busy, and no eye contact is being made with the lecturer, I do think problems begin to emerge. Let’s be real here… there are so many distractions sitting on one’s desk with a laptop… IMing, emailing, shopping, browsing, games,…. If I was a bored student sitting in a boring lecture, then why not?

Eureka!

The proportion of distracted students drops off significantly when there is a challenging and engaging dialog going on as part of the lecture… when students are more than just scribes. The few that choose to tune out for whatever reason should experience fairly immediate natural reprecussions - bad grades. But, this is not a fair analysis when one is a lecturer in a hall of 100-200 students. Then what? Is it time to rethink this particular model of instruction? What drives it anyway? Is it economics and the dollar, or is it sound pedagogy? Why is it that somehow we can leave sound padagogy behind in higher education because ‘it has always been done that way’ or “I did just fine in my class of 150 students.” or “It separates those who can and those who can’t.”, or “It teaches discipline and memorization of your content.”, or is it some combination of all of the above? I have been thinking about this for some time now. Do we just accept that some institutions of higher education are businesses… Learning factories? Will students begin looking for other alternatives in the near future? And, if class size is not the issue here and laptops are not welcome in smaller classes, then what is the issue - really? If a lecturer wants a quality class discussion, free of clackity-clack on the keyboard, why not just say, “Close your lids.” Any thoughts?