Knowing where the pitfalls are

When I was in college, I took a semester away from classes to live in Ecuador with a friend of mine and completely immerse myself in  an unfamiliar country and culture. Most of my adventures were unplanned, such as getting on the wrong bus, ending up in some unfamiliar place and trying to get back home alive. Those days were fun and made the trip seem less like real life and more like a movie. Some of my adventures were planned, such as going to the jungle or climbing on of Ecuador's many volcanoes. The most beautiful volcano, El Cotopaxi, particularly held my fascination because of its massive beauty. One day I remember telling my host family that I was going to climb El Cotopaxi, which was only a few miles from their family's dairy farm. They tried to discourage me from doing this because of the stories they'd read over the years of inexperienced climbers (mainly from Europe) trying to climb without an experienced guide and getting caught in a crevasse. Their fear was not the climbing, the cold or the altitude, although these were all things to be prepared for. They were most fearful of the crevasses, and if you wanted to climb the volcano successfully you had to know where they were. I find this story particularly relevant to using technology in my teaching. Actually, if I am the one using the technology, I don't think too much about the crevasses because they typically only affect me and waste my time. Sometimes a certain tool won't work correctly in the middle of my teaching, so the students get to sit there and watch me try to maintain composure, but I have learned how to avoid those embarrassing moments pretty well. The tools I use, I know them well, and I take extra care in learning new tools. However, it's an entirely different story when I am teaching my students how to use a tool. I feel a lot more pressure to structure my instruction in a way so their time is not wasted or they don' t get needlessly frustrated. It's quite intimidating, actually. For example, I was just talking to someone about how to convert multiple scanned documents (JPEG files) into a PDF. I thought I had given pretty good instructions, but I forgot to inform them of a particular crevasse, and this person ended up accidentally deleting all of the scanned files. We were able to recover them, but that did little to calm the pure anger at me and the technology.

This story just reinforces to me what it means to be technology literate, and how difficult it is to know the ins and outs of tools in order to help novice users steer away from the major time drains. But it also reminds me that every bad experience just develops my cognitive complexity a little bit more and will help me teach it better the next time. So don't stay off the volcano. Get out there and have some fun, but don't forget to make a note of the crevasses. Someone else's time might just be at stake.

If you're gonna talk tweet, you better be able to back it up

I'm sure by now most people have heard about Pres. Obama's "jackass" comment, in reference to Kanye West's hijacking of Taylor Swift's moment in the sun. Let me just say, I don't know anything about Kanye West, and if I have ever listened to his music, it was within the context of Muzak, and I didn't know it was him. The same is true of Taylor Swift, except I do know she sings Country music. I saw the video, and yes, what Mr. West did was a jackass thing to do. Second, I think it's necessary to point out that Pres. Obama is probably not the first president to use what some might classify as a swear word. Pres. Bush used the s-word when talking to Tony Blair in, what he thought, was an unmiked conversation. From what I've heard, LBJ had the capacity to make sailors blush, but that is entirely hearsay from one of my (very) Republican relatives from Texas. This raises the question about whether or not the president is allowed to have opinions such as, "So-an-so is  a jackass," and if so, is he free to voice them in private, off-the-record conversations. My personal opinion is yes and yes. However, I don't see that as the real issue here. What is more troubling here is the manner in which this "news" got out to the public. The comment was overheard by an employee of ABC (while Pres. Obama was being interviewed by CNBC, nonetheless), who immediately sent the following message out via Twitter:

Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at the VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.

Apparently, this particular tweet spread like wild fire, and I'm sure, as is the fashion these days, apologies were demanded, talk shows will have a heyday for a week or so, and Twitter will laugh all the way to the bank. Just think, if  Rep. Joe Wilson had waited a couple of weeks to yell "You lie!" from the floor of Congress, he could have included "And you cuss, too!"

What people don't realize is how damaging events like this can be. This particular incident seems to be getting a lot of laughs, and apparently all the proverbial fences have been mended, but that shouldn't mask the fact that social media, such as Twitter, actually have the power to destroy someone's reputation. Whether it's ratemyprofessor.com, Twitter, a blog or some other means of communicating with a sizable audience, people not only read this stuff, but they believe it and pass it on! On top of that, it shows up in Google searches long after the content has been taken down. This can be, undeniably, damaging to a person's life.

It's no wonder schools are scared to death of this stuff. If one kid uses these media to bully another student on the school's dime, it's seen as justification to completely block all such sites. I guess my question is, why don't schools take the proactive approach and meet this stuff head on? I wonder how many social studies teachers took the time today to talk about this event; not just the details of the event, but the broader social issues represented by this event. Are we using this kind of thing as mortar to build the wall a little higher and stronger, or are we looking for the lessons in it to help students understand just a little more the world we (the adults) have created. Twitter, or whatever technology that replaces it, is not going away, and I just wonder how they will learn to use it respectfully, carefully and thoughtfully.

I won't read this unless you print it

I recently read Keith Barton's 2005 article, "Primary Sources in History: Breaking Through the Myths" for about the upteenth time. It's a great article that talks about the misconceptions many teachers have about using primary source documents with their students. The belief many teachers have, especially those with little experience with primary sources themselves, is that students will learn more from reading/analyzing primary sources directly than they will from secondary sources. These teachers assign primary sources as reading assignments as if they were chapters from a history textbook. This is almost always confusing to students, and they rarely make the connections between documents that expert historians do. This has less to do with the documents or the students and more to do with the way expert historians approach primary sources. In order to make sense of primary source documents, historians employ certain strategies that help them contextualize the source and see where it fits with other sources written about similar events at around the same period in time. OK, make a mental note: historians, reading primary source documents, strategies. Earlier today, Willy from edfoc.us referenced an article by Mark Bauerlein, in which he claims online reading is a literacy of a lesser kind. His premise is that people, especially students who have gorged themselves on media since they were able to sit upright, don't really read online text. They skim, click and scroll past vast expanses of text, mining out the words they want to see (my paraphrase). The whole argument Mr. Bauerline poses is reminiscent of Marhall McLuhan, who believed that different media would embed themselves with the message, affecting the way our brains would perceive the message. If this perspective were to be taken to the extreme, one could argue that it doesn't matter what a person reads online -- a classic poem, a love letter, a death threat, sports scores, War and Peace -- because the end result will be scanning, clicking and scrolling. A lesser kind of literacy. If people follow this line of logic -- and trust me, school adminstrators have been known to take it in hook, line and sinker -- then it's no wonder there is such a knee-jerk reaction to digital technologies.

In Mr. Bauerlein's defense, I have taught online classes for several years, and I know firsthand that many students don't read the course documents that could very well mean the difference between passing my class and failing it. These documents are online, and although I urge my students to print them off and read them carefully, I know they skim, click and scroll. Then they argue with me that I was unclear about the due date for a paper they failed to turn in on time. So, yes, online reading can be a problem, but would these students have studied the syllabus any closer had I handed them a printed copy? Probably not.

This brings me back to the problems associated with giving students historical documents. Regardless, of the potential to do more harm than good, there can be tremendous payoffs for student learning if teachers structure the activity appropriately and give their students strategies for decoding these documents. Strategies such as SOAPS, APPARTS and SCIM-C are all designed to give students a heuristic for analyzing primary sources. The same is true of reading instruction, where students are taught strategies for comprehending what they read. Teachers don't give first graders a pile of books, then complain that they don't know how to read, and this shouldn't happen with online text either.

What Willy addresses in his post is that new types of media -- digital text, in this case -- require different, and sometimes new, strategies for avoiding the pitfalls they introduce into the learning environment. Rather than demonize digital text, we should see it as a challenge that requires new ways of thinking about the problem. We don't approach other content areas without strategies for navigating through them, and online reading should be no different. Whether it's using new tools, employing new strategies or simply pointing out the pitfalls, online reading is here to stay and should be approached proactively.

A book by any other name ...

I just read an interesting post by David Warlick, where he discusses the general misconception by adults that "kids love computers." He was responding to someone who suggested picture books be put on iPhones because "kids love computers." This seems like a logical hook to get kids interested in something they might otherwise avoid. When I was teaching 3rd and 4th grade I used to make that very claim. Students who seemed to have no pulse would suddenly become animated when they heard me talk about going to the computer lab. This was before interactive whiteboards, so I can only imagine their response had I started moving things around the board with my finger. However, I don't think their enthusiasm was directed at the computer, but rather at what the computer represented. One finding from my dissertations was that students in general seem to like using computers in school. However, they like using the computer in different ways and for different reasons. Some students liked the tool they were using -- a web-based storyboard maker. Some students liked the activity -- visual discovery - - and reported they would have liked it just as much without computers. Some students liked visual discovery better with the storyboard tool, and some students thought the whole assignment -- the tech and the activity -- were not that interesting.

David Warlick's says this about kids and technology:

First of all, kids do not love computers any more than I loved my baseball bat, shoulder pads, or box of legos.  They were merely the apparatus of the play that I engaged in.  Computers are no different, except that they are NEW to my generation and in almost every respect more compelling than any Louisville Slugger (JU’s Thinking Stick notwithstanding).  Our children do not go to their mobile phone because it is their “tech of choice.”  They go there because it is where their friends are.

I found this to be very insightful, and it reminded me of this quotation by Esther Dyson:

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

People are drawn to technology because of what it will let them do, as well as what it represents. My mother and her friends have become heavy users of Facebook, not because they love Web 2.0 or social networking software. They love it because they can reconnect and keep up with the people they otherwise might lose touch with. Applications like FB give you a sense that people aren't that far away, a comforting feeling in an age when people seem to constantly move around and get farther apart.

So, while computers and other technology may be a hook to get student attention initially, we can't expect that initial fascination to be sustained over time. Unless these students associate the technology with things they find enjoyable, challenging or rewarding, we run the risk of giving them one more thing to roll their eyes at. It's more than an object of fascination; it's a conduit.

Facebook profiling

This ties into what I was writing about the other day. A friend of mine mentioned this article about Facebook on, of all places, Facebook. I swear, I read this AFTER I posted about Twitter the other day. If you have the time, or if you spend any time at all on FB, you should read this. It's funny, true and a little embarrassing because we are all probably guilty of doing some of these things at one time or another. This article, and my recent post about Twitter, have really prompted me to think about how innovations cause us to constantly reframe the world. I have been telling my ed. tech. students for years that we (humans) create technology, then technology creates us. My classic example is highways. Highways were created to facilitate faster, smoother commutes from one place to another. Over time people have become dependent on highways, and as the population has grown they are getting more and more crowded. Now, instead of technology working for me, I have to arrange my life around the constraints of the technology (i.e., roads that can't handle the number of cars). Thankfully, I don't live in a city with traffic problems anymore, but that really isn't the point.

The point is, people create technology and technology, in turn, begins to shape us. Some people are dependent on their smart phones. Some people won't speak in public without presentation software. Some people feel compelled to share every minute detail of their lives. The list could go on forever.

Human personality traits have probably not changed all that much in the last 10,000 years. I knew sympathy-baiters and town-criers well before FB or Twitter existed. What's interesting is how a simple little tool -- the ability to write what's on your mind from any place at any time -- has pushed these personality traits to the forefront. Perhaps folks who fall into these categories had other outlets before FB came around. Maybe they were the chronic mass-emailers of the world. But I tend to think that technologies like this have amplified these traits in people that otherwise wouldn't have been labeled in this way.  I used to get relatively few forwarded mass emails before FB, but I receive dozens of FB invitations every day. Who has time for all these games, causes, lil' green patches, farms and mafia warfare? I barely have time to be writing this. And now that Griggs has given these personalities labels, I don't think I will ever see my FB friends in the same way.

This phenomenon is also true of the online teaching I've done. The online environment pushes some personality traits to the forefront that I otherwise wouldn't have noticed. On one hand, it's nice to see a different side of students. I actually get to know my online students pretty well, and a lot of them thrive in the online environment. But I'm also tempted to label students in different ways. And if I can label someone, it makes it easy to dismiss them. I constantly have to resist the urge to label students as ignorant because they misspell everything in the discussions or lazy because they do everything at the last minute. These particular traits aren't really that evident in the classroom environment. I find it ironic that an environment that is, inherently, more private removes some of the hiding places students use in the classroom. While I am able to conduct class in my pajamas from the kitchen, certain aspects of my personality that I can hide in public are suddenly exposed.

Just some thoughts. I'm sure this will come up again. Until then, I will go lurk around on Facebook.

I actually used Twitter today

As an avid TechCrunch reader, I have a history of creating accounts for tools they mention without really thinking about what the tool does or whether I will actually use it. One such tool was Twitter. I honestly cannot remember when I created my Twitter account, but my inaugural tweet was almost a month to the day before my twins were born. I honestly have no memory of writing either of the two tweets recorded in my account, and I don't know why I decided to post a random comment about watching my twins play on the floor in late March of 2008. I have a really good memory, and both of these events, while permanently archived in Twitter, have completely dissolved from my mind. As if this can't get any stranger, I have 22 followers. I'm practically Ashton Kutcher. It's just weird to me that 22 people either saw or searched for my name and clicked the "Follow" button. I'm sure they are very disappointed. I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident the lack of activity in Twitter can be attributed to two things: a) I don't have a cool phone that lets me tweet at anytime and any place, and b) I find it kind of obnoxious. (I try not to think that some people actually consider what I do on this blog essentially the same at tweeting.) When I see status updates on Facebook that are obviously from Twitter (e.g., @, #, bit.ly, misspelled words, etc.), I actually get annoyed and don't read what the person actually wrote. More than that, however, is the fact that I don't really have time to read up-to-the-second updates about what people are doing. Do I really care that someone I kind of knew in high school needs more coffee? Personally, I don't feel the need to tell the world that I am sitting at a traffic light or that I just ate too  much for lunch. And I am suddenly feeling the need to confess that the most chronic Twitter addicts in my Facebook network have either been de-friended or hidden. Wow, that feels better.

However, today things changed just ever so slightly. It all started when a web tool I like (Google Calendar) wouldn't load. I tried refreshing several times with no luck. I went to the Google Dashboard, but they don't even have today's date up yet. So, I had to look in the only place I knew would have realtime information on this. And I found out that some people are experiencing the same thing. There is no explanation or clue as to when it be available again, but at least Twitter let me find out that I'm not alone. It seems that this is not affecting everyone, by the way. So, rather than obsessing about this and trying to see if the problem was caused on my end, I could let it rest and get back to work.

Twitter can count this as a score in their favor. I still refuse to tweet, but if a widely-used web page won't work for me I will likely look on Twitter first. This is by no means comparable to the protests in Iran and the subsequent military crackdown, but I did get to experience firsthand the benefits of realtime data. I'm still trying to get my head around the implications this has for children growing up in the 21st Century and how these technologies will shape how they define "news." But it's an interesting thing to think about. And one more thing from curbyalexander @somerandomdude: We're all tired and ready to go home at the end of the day. But thanks for sharing.

And your homework for tonight is ... Facebook?

I've been thinking a lot about this post from Will Richardson. On one hand, I agree with Will. There is tremendous potential in using social media for learning. I have personally had this experience while trying to learn something new, such as CSS, PHP, digital video, guitar riffs, how to clean my lawnmower's carburettor, etc. In most cases, someone else held the key to a problem I was struggling with, and had I not been connected to a large pool of folks with similar interests and extensive knowledge, I would either be stuck in a rut or would have bailed on the whole thing altogether. The distinct characteristic from these learning experiences and those of K-12 (and undergrad, in most cases) students is that I was personally driven to learn something new. Students are personally driven to learn new things as well, but in many cases their personal interests don't align with the learning objectives established by their teachers. So, in the case of this 20-year old University of Missouri student, he probably is learning a lot by engaging in social media. He has probably learned a slew of new terms from the Urban Dictionary. He has learned how to be witty in 140 characters or less. He has learned how to keep tabs on his high school girlfriend. And I wouldn't be surprised if he has not only learned how to get free music from YouTube, but also discovered music he otherwise would have never heard of. The challenge for educators (and professors) is a) to convince this kid that most of these "skills" (minus the stalking) can cross over to his academics and make learning a much more personally rewarding experience, and b) to venture into this scary territory where they relinquish control over the learning environment without drenching it in a cheap, imitation school-scented cologne.

In response to Will's question, I'm not sure the blame for this kid's lack of vision lies with anyone in particular. Perhaps the blame lies with anyone who believes differently and doesn't do anything about it.