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.

Know anyone like this?

Well, the latest discussion happening over on Will Richardson’s blog in conjunction with my prior blog post got me to thinking. What does our local school district offer in terms of professional development for my kids’ teachers? Are they learning about new spheres of practice, learning, communication, participation… Here is the list of what is being offered between February and June.

- IEP Open Lab

- SMART Boards for Beginners (X3)

- Social Emotional Learning Building Team Training

- Best Children’s Literature in the Classroom

- Adult CPR

- First Aid for Coaches

- Music: the Orff Express

- Web Portal Pages

- ESOL Inservice

- Para Support Group

- Implementing the District Lesson Plan Format (That sounds invigorating!)

- IEP Open Lab

- Excel Basics

- Mandarin Training Report Tool

- Building a Caring School Climate through Service Learning

- the Art of VideoStreaming

- Motivating hart to Reach, Uninterested, and Disruptive Students

- Building Circles of Support for Autistic students

- What Talented Readers Need

- Introduction to Computer Animation Basics (Art teachers only)

All of these topics have merit, of course. They are all important. But most are discipline specific and don’t have a wider audience appeal or relevancy. There are few general sessions that could benefit any and all teachers. But what I want to stress is that there are NO sessions dealing with Web 2.0 or any of its related technologies and certainly nothing on empowering teachers to connect, learn, contribute, participate… in larger communities of practice. So, do teachers know they can participate in such new forms of learning networks? Well, they are not learning about the possibilities in our district. So, I think Will Richardson’s estimate…

“But I would still venture to guess that 75% (maybe more) of educators in this country still don’t know that they can have this network.”

…is probably on target.

For those many teachers who can’t seem to make these after-school PD sessions for some very valid reasons (children, other jobs, other commitments or responsibilities, nothing relevant offered, no follow-up support,…), new on-line learning/networking opportunities would seem to make a great deal of sense. Do we just need to sit back and be patient in this regard? Will it come in good time… or too late?

Stumbled across an article in the NY Times titled, “If You Can’t Let Go, Twitter“. It it, the writer describes her attempt to connect with her 3 daughters (digital natives, right) via Twitter. Let’s just say, it didn’t work. After trying a number of tactics, including giving away money, she consults with a Walter J. Carl, an assistant professor of communications studies at Northeastern University, who said he wasn’t surprised. He is quoted as explaining the problem in the following way:

“You want to use these tools to keep up on others, in a good way, of course, and to let them keep up on you,” said Professor Carl, whose research focuses on social media. “But their perception is it’s surveillance.” One of the main reasons people embrace social media — Facebook, for instance — is to create identities for themselves and control other people’s perceptions of them.”

And then…

“Maybe Twitter isn’t the right tool for that job,” he said. “The people who I see using it are an older demographic, people in marketing or P.R. or advertising, who use it for work, to present themselves as particular types of people. They’ll twitter, ‘I’m traveling,’ or ‘I’m going to interesting restaurants.’ They’re using it to do identity work.”

Isn’t it interesting how this new communication tool that so many adults are using is not considered all that useful with kids… that they are more concerned with “creating identities for themselves and control other people’s perceptions of them”, as happens on Facebook and MySpace. But here’s my question: kids to love to IM and text. They thrive on social networking. One would think, in combination with social networking services, that a tool like Twitter would be “phat“. Huh!

In this new age of information glut/data smog, the importance of being information literate has grown exponentially. How do we reconcile this generation’s desire to “control other people’s perception of them”? Seem’s natural, for sure. But is the digital realm blurring the line between fact and fiction in a way that we must better address in education? Are students more accepting of blurred realities? And, if so, how does this impact one’s ability to value the truth and seek it out?

Okay, I understand the basic premise of the pencil argument (and here). But, come on now… this is far from an equal analogy! Here is what Doug Johnson had to say about the potential risks that pencils bring into the classroom in the February 2006 issue of Learning & Leading with Technology. It was referenced in Wesley Freyer’s latest post over on his Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog.:

1. A student might use a pencil to poke out the eye of another student.
2. A student might write a dirty word or, worse yet, a threatening note to another student, with a pencil.
3. One student might have a mechanical pencil, making those with wooden ones feel bad.
4. The pencil might get stolen.
5. Pencils break and need repairing all the time.
6. Kids who have pencils might doodle instead of working on their assignments or listening to the teacher.

Now, again, I understand the rationale behind this argument, but let’s compare:

1. Only psychopathic students would gouge out another’s eye… with anything. However, teachers have been known to be violent pencil wielders. Imagine what they could be capable of with an iPod in their hands!

2. A written insult or profanity is seen only by the one who holds the written note. We all fully understand the far-reaching implications of digital bullying!

3. One simply cannot compare pencil-envy with things of high value that create classes of students and do create envy (high-fashion clothing, shoes, and yes… electronics!)

4. In fact, pencils do get stolen all the time. I have rarely seen a student fall to pieces over it. However, if it were a $250 pencil, I could see why that could happen.

5. Pencils break. So you sharpen them again. The “repair” is done in seconds. Electronics break and are repaired with greater cost, time, and learning interruption/disruption.

6. I would much rather have a student doodle with his or her pencil than be consumed with the vast array of on-line distraction. And, most other classmates don’t usually get distracted by one student’s doodling. Not so with a laptop or other electronic device.

So, if we are to present a compelling rationale for issues surrounding freedom to learn and teaching/learning innovation, we at least need to bring valid and sound arguments to the table. To do otherwise only serves to make light of real and pressing concerns of many stakeholders. If a pencil is the equivalent of any other learning device, then I say, let’s stick with the pencils. They are cheaper, easily replaceable, quite reliable, disposable, efficient, highly portable, facilitate collaboration and sharing of information, they have excellent battery life - heck, they don’t even have lead in them anymore, making them environmentally friendly to boot!

But, if there is a significant difference here (and I would agree that there is), then we had better not be making such silly comparisons. Folks might just want to settle for the pencil, then.

Note:
Freyer’s blog post is otherwise right on the mark.