As we move (willingly or otherwise) towards learning environments that embrace the use of digital devices such as handhelds, ipods and mobiles, a certain initial uneasiness is not out of order.  Thinking carefully about the merit of anything that we, as educators, or our students introduce into the classroom is always a good thing.  These devices are capable of facilitating the acquisition and organization of informatio and they also enable networking and collaboration – high yield practices when used mindfully.  However, they can also be perceived as threatening and risky.

Cautionary Tales

There are countless cautionary tales chronicling the public posting (on youtube, facebook and a host of other public cyberspaces) of events and exchanges that occurred within the brick and mortar walls of the school.  Digital fragments (photos, video, IMs) – easily manipulated and shared – do cause harm.   Cyberbullying is, sadly, a familiar issue that no one in the community – administrators, teachers, parents or students – can ignore.   To say that these events occurred outside the classroom underestimates the expanse of the new learning environment while overestimating the stability of the boundary between classroom and real world.  Socially networked students reveal that border to be both nebulous and porous – in a sense out of control.

The Ethical Imperative

I don’t think that policies requiring students to keep their devices out of sight and out of mind are the answer.  Instead, we need to find ways of inculcating within ourselves and our students the mindset that we need to assume responsibility for when and how we use them.  Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future may provide helpful insight in terms of addressing the misappropriation of digitally connective devices.  Gardner proposes that the 5 cognitive capacities required to thrive in the web 2.0 world include the following:

·         The Disciplined Mind

·         The Synthesizing Mind

·         The Creating Mind

·         The Respectful Mind

·         The Ethical Mind

Although Gardner’s discussion of the first 3 is worth the read and some discussion, it is the final two that speak directly to the dilemma posed by the mobile and other ubiquitous devices in education.  His discussion of the Respectful Mind calls our attention to the interpersonal relationship and its’ accompanying responsibilities.  How do our actions impact those with whom we are connected?  Describing the Ethical Mind, Gardner highlights the responsibility we have to our role within the community.  Both teachers and students have roles and responsibilities that warrant candid scrutiny.   How do our actions resonate or clash with our responsibilities as Teacher or Student or Collaborator?

By including both the respectful and the ethical minds as essential capacities, Gardner reinforces the notion that we need to encourage within our students the binding of creative and synthesizing abilities to a responsible and ethical imperative.  While learning that meaningfully incorporates the goals of character development provides opportunities for students to engage in critical analysis of their inter- and intra- personal aptitudes within the web 2.0 world, I believe that an equally high-yield strategy to foster respectful and ethical behaviours is collaboration.  Through the lens of the emerging web 2.0 influenced learning environments, collaboration changes from novel to pivotal in terms of instructional strategy and professional practice.

Collaborative vs. Competitive

The competitive nature of conventional learning environments (think norms-referenced grading stronghold) serves as a petri dish for exploitation and manipulation – bullying  – in cyberspace, in the classroom and on the playground.  As classrooms evolve into genuinely collaborative spaces, they confront and disrupt the competitive atmosphere that permeates current classrooms.

Embracing the social nature of learning as outlined by Vygotsky, collaborative learning environments maximize the potential of socially constructed knowledge.  Within this type of environment, digital tools that facilitate networking would be seen as complimentary.  As educators, we need to model the ethical and responsible use of technology for our students.  We need to make explicit the conversational spirit of learning by demonstrating our own learning process and encouraging students to see themselves and their peers as both producers and consumers of knowledge and information.  Connected kid who are well-equipped with an understanding of interpersonal and ethical responsibility, have, in my opinion, a greater chance of disrupting the competitive and isolating aspect of learning while reaping the benefits of learning from and with a broad network of peers.

I came across this insightful little video created by Will Richardson to illustrate how social networking and web 2.0 tools have changed the way that current events stories break , become aggregated and refined using tools such as, in this case, twitter and flickr:

The News According to Twitter

“Playing around with Prezi.com here but also trying to capture what I think is an interesting shift in the way we learn about, gather and share news these days.”

The shift that Richardson identifies here has interesting and immediate implications for education, as well. We have already witnessed the emerging impact of The Wisdom of Crowds philosophy and its insistence on the development of sophisticated collaborative and critical thinking aptitudes. The shift here has more to do with the “experience of crowds”, if you will – multiple perspectives dialoging in real time to create a shared narrative of an event that is swiftly disseminated, even as the event itself continues to unfold and updates or revisions are being made to the emerging narrative.

The Experience of Crowds

The “Experience of Crowds” demands a further shift towards the increasingly imperative development of highly refined and rigorous skills in the area of synthesis.  Wrapped up in the unfolding events as narrated across a multitude of 1st person perspectives – eye witness accounts captured digitally – consumers must be open to accepting and digesting revision in real-time.

The skills and aptitudes required are, in my estimation, not novel to my students, for whom this shift might be, at best, unsurprising, considering their immersion within a world where their experiences have always been mediated and captured digitally.  It is, however, an important shift within myself as an educator, in order to ensure that I provide a learning environment that challenges my students to refine their synthesizing and critical thinking talents.  The old media literacy question “what is this text really saying to me?” proliferates and includes questions such as “What perspectives are emerging as this text unfolds?”, “How does the emergent nature of this text manipulate my understanding?”  and, to be sure, “What part of this text am I creating?”

As the Computer Contact Teacher (read jack of all things wired and wireless) at my rather large K-8 school, I have started to recruit Intermediate ( Grade 7 and 8 ) students to perform some of the basic troubleshooting that I would normally do prior to placing a call ticket to have a field technician come out to address a problem.  Really, these kids know more than I do about most of the technology that we are using in our school anyway.  I wanted to find a way to post the various computer-related issues that teachers email to me in a way that my Student Technology Leaders would be able to access them and perform the basic troubleshooting at recess.  I read a review of projecthingy and it seems I have found my solution!  I embedded the code on our Digital Media Club blog and voila!  I have a login-access work area where I can post the ‘problem’ and assign it to a student.  The student can then login, find out what has been assigned to her/him, troubleshoot and post a message letting me know if the problem is fixed or provide further details to pass along in the call ticket.  I love it!

This weekend a friend introduced me to Springwidgets and Yahoo Pipes.  Springwidgets allows you to, among other things, create an rss reader from multiple feeds.  Yahoo Pipes allows you to aggregate, manipulate and mashup web content – in my case, rss feeds from a few of my favourite sites and blogs that I mashed together and then sorted and filtered.   Check out my Good Feeds page to see the result and keep up on the latest from Wired, ReadWriteWeb, and Technorati.  I have a few more to add, which will be easy to do, thanks to my new friends, Springwidgets and Yahoo Pipes.

2 Resolutions:  Only 1 Counts

Despite my skepticism, I made 2 resolutions for 2009.  Maintaining this blog and learning more about digital literacies is one.  The other is more typical and therefore doomed to failure, allowing my treadmill to return to its previous function as drying rack sooner than later.

3 moments that made me say “Woah!”:

Three separate, though related, moments in late 2008 prompted my commitment to think more deeply about how our students have changed and how we, as educators must change to meet their needs.   These moments held up the mirror in which I saw reflected what Marc Prensky calls “The Digital Immigrant”.  In all three moments, I was struck with the slightly uncomfortable feeling that I was indeed foreign to the digital world.  I felt old and, despite my best efforts, my ‘accent’ was showing.

The first moment was when I was counseling a student who was having difficulty being at school.  He said to me, “My online life is better than my real life.”  After I got over my initial reaction of “Woah!”, I started to ask what made his online life better and his answers revealed that he felt empowered and in charge of his online identity.  This led me to want to learn more about social networking, online identity, engagement and authority.  I wanted to know how to use his online experiences to help make things better for him at school.

The second moment occurred when a student looked at me earnestly and said, “I don’t typically read text in .doc format.  I use .doc only to edit.”  This same student, along with two of his peers, used the collaborative Google Docs to work on a group project – without any instruction from me.  Woah!  I realized that I needed to know more about how students interact with and produce digital text.

The third moment, and closer to home, was when my 6 year old son told me that he had “skyped Santa.”  Woah!  I couldn’t help but wonder how different his way of processing his environment is compared to my own.

So, here I am, a mom and an educator, with my plan to deepen my thinking about learning and learning about thinking …