A bouquet to the government for its planned investment in ultra-fast broadband. From an education perspective, this is the most significant technology initiative in schools since, well, the introduction of pen and paper to classrooms.

I’ve written about the government’s plans and the implications for schools in the latest edition of Education Aotearoa. But there’s a few more things to say – bouquets and brickbats to award.

Has enough money been allocated to do the job? $1.5 billion – to be matched by the private sector – won’t be enough. Will this mean a further injection of funds or perhaps a revision of the initiative’s objectives? The good folks at the Ministry of Economic Development have assured me that there will be enough to go round, but their explanation of the funding model hurt my brain!

I also wonder what students will use to access ultra-fast broadband once the cables have been laid. My experience is that classrooms – at best – have a couple of ancient desktops gathering dust in the corner and maybe a pod of laptops or a computer lab that they can book. Time to get cracking on improving the ratio of students to netbooks/laptops/iPads.

New South Wales is pushing on with plans to issue netbooks to students, and recent research shows this can be a very good thing for achievement in schools. Great to see the Labour Party considering a policy position on this.

If teachers were faced with a classroom of students with computers, would they know what to do? Professional development is critical, and what’s currently available to schools could do with revision and extension. Some of my buddies are astonished at the notion of training teachers to teach with ICT. No one taught me how to use Flickr! The justification is simple – we require consistency and quality of teaching, as well as equal learning opportunities, for all our young people.

Another bouquet, though, to the government for opting for a bit of bulk buying where there are obvious efficiencies. Their announcement that Pharmac’s role will be extended to take charge of hospital medicines is an example of what is hopefully a trend towards sensible centralised procurement.

Remember that peculiar hue of paint that all school buildings used to wear? The introduction of Tomorrow’s Schools in 1989 put a stop to that. It shifted many of the financial and administrative responsibilities for managing schools from the centre to elected boards of trustees – permitting schools to choose their own colour of paint. Great for schools wanting to develop their own localised teaching and learning programmes, but crazy when applied to ICT infrastructure.

It’s crazy to have every school negotiate separately for data traffic. It would be crazy for some schools to opt in and others to opt out of joining the incipient National Education Network. The very successful laptop scheme for teachers shows how a centrally organised programme is still able to give schools a degree of choice while saving the system from the burden of every teacher researching and deciding which laptop to buy.

Making the most of ultra-fast broadband requires some big decisions elsewhere in the system. Are we up for it?

The second edition of the NZEI’s new magazine for teachers in schools and kindergartens is hot off the press, and it includes an article written by Boost.

Sarah’s been asked by the NZEI to contribute a regular column on technology in education to Education Aotearoa. Around half of Boost’s work is in the education sector, so we’re really happy to get this opportunity to talk about one of our big passions: how technology can support great teaching and learning in our classrooms.

Our article in this issue is about the benefits for teachers of using technology to grow their personal learning networks. It includes links to tools and resources online and five simple steps for building your personal learning network.

It’s available on the magazine’s website, where you can also leave comments and feedback. Other features in this issue include new research and false claims about early childhood education and the latest on national standards.

The MacArthur Foundation in the US funds some very interesting digital media and learning initiatives. Last month, they released this video featuring those involved in developing and using the very cool YouMedia space at the Chicago Public Library, which opened in July this year.

It’s an example of how young people’s use of digital media can be factored into libraries. The way they’ve set up the library space recognises the importance of social connections between students and leverages their digital interests. Connie Yowell from MacArthur Foundation says that at the library the students will find ‘extraordinary resources on anything they may be interested in but now they can create produce and make things as well’.

Nichole Pinkard from Chicago Public Library adds that the point of YouMedia is not just about making young people into movie producers and music producers but enabling them to become ‘fluid in use of technologies so they can use them to engage in public conversation and public discourse.’

Locally, it’s great to see the Aotearoa People’s Network Kaharoa get an award at the LIANZA conference this month. Interesting stories on their website about the impact that providing free broadband in public libraries is having on the community and on the use and development of library services.

YouMedia from Spotlight on Vimeo

I’m pretty excited about this. Clive Thompson writes in Wired Magazine 17.09 about Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, and the Standford Study of Writing.

“[Lunsford] has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples — everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“‘I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,’ she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing out ability to write. It’s reviving it – and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.’

“The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. …

“We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.”

Martin Westwell is a great speaker on social change, technology, neuro-science, ‘back to basics’ policy and evidence-based practice in education. Unfortunately this video is only part 1 of his keynote to the 2009 Innovation Showcase (I’ve scoured the web for part 2, but no luck so far), but it’s well worth it all the same.

Some of Martin’s observations include:

• There’s no such thing as evidence-based practice … evidence should inform practice and policy but not dictate it.
• We remember what we feel. The changing environment changes the way we think, which changes the way we interact with the world.
• We’re shifting from a question-rich, answer-poor society (where knowing stuff was where the value lay) to a question-poor, answer-rich society (where the value lies in transforming information into knowledge).
• The appearance of a ‘back to basics’ policy in education means something has changed, and the system doesn’t understand the change and is pushing back against it.
• We can’t assume that the use of technology in itself will have the influence that we want it to … It’s what you do with the technology that makes a difference.
• We can use technology purposefully to manipulate the learning environment and learning experiences to meet the needs of specific students.

Here are Martin’s presentation slides, and here’s a series of podcasts from Martin on similar themes. (Thanks to Jedd Bartlett, who provided the link to this video over twitter.)

I spoke about technology in education at the Future of the Book Conference at the end of June. The conference was great fun. I was there for the second day – for perspectives on the whole conference, check out these posts by Virginia and Matthew.

I talked about how technology is changing the way young people organise themselves and take action, access information and learn, connect with each other, create and publish to audiences, and consume services and products. I talked about how we might design learning experiences for these young people.

How digital technology is changing the way young people learn, create and consume.

New technologies, new practices, new learning – the result should be new approaches to educational publishing. Did we get that at the conference? I’m not sure we did.

The future of reading and learning

If we focus on book formats and technologies to the exclusion of exploring changes in the social and cultural practices associated with using technology, it’s inevitable that the future of the book is pretty much going to be a book. If we want to open the debate and explore the possibilities beyond the book, then we need to consider the future of reading and the future of learning to get to the future of publishing.

We also need to call a halt to the unhelpful dichotomy that pits publisher-produced, ‘credible’, ‘superior’ content against user-created, ‘unreliable’, ‘inferior’ content. If we’re truly going to follow market trends, as conference speakers proposed, then we have to pay attention to interacting and collaborating with our audiences as well as producing quality content.

Opportunities for publishers

So what are the opportunities for educational publishers?

• To become experts in designing learning experiences and environments that maximise the affordances of technology and support educators to understand the limitations and the benefits of technology.
• To engage directly with our communities of learners on a longer term basis – curating their experience of our products and responding to their interpretations and the learning experiences that they bring to the table.

From an education perspective, we need to engage young people’s cultural and social practices and provide opportunities for transformative learning (a shift from filling students’ heads with facts to including opportunities for students to do something with their knowledge). We can support teachers to be effective in the classroom through our learning designs.

I think publishers can commission, write, design and curate across the range of media and in multimodal forms (thanks to Meg Pickard, Communities and Interaction Manager at The Guardian, for this notion of ‘curating’). Publishers should use whatever media is most appropriate to bring together content and community to tell their story.

I think publishers can plan for and predict likely interaction with audiences and contribute an editorial or curatorial role that influences and creates community – without scripting that interaction to the point where participants can’t relate their own experiences to it.

Some examples

Some examples heading in worthwhile directions:

• DigitalNZ’s memory maker lets users remix content (how cool would it be if users could also upload their own content for remixing?).
• On the Learnz virtual fieldtrips – from volcanoes to marine reserves – students stay at school but visit places they would never otherwise go and interact with people they would never otherwise meet – supported by background materials and activities, audioconferencing, images and videos uploaded daily.
• And a suggestion for converting a print publication to online (I’ve blogged about this before). What learning could we make available if the fabulous Journal of Young People’s Writing were a blog? Instead of publishing completed student work in a fixed format, we could publish student work with great potential – with a great opening, a great ending or great dialogue. Invite writer David Hill to critique and explore. Invite other students to comment and illustrate. Invite graphic artist Ali Teo to respond to the illustrators. Draw comparisons and contrasts with work by other writers. Turn the existing model inside out by exposing the workings that are past and hidden by the time classrooms receive the print version.

The slides from my presentation are here.

I’ve just stumbled across this blog – Technology for Communities. It’s the combined project of Etienne Wenger, John D Smith and Nancy While – all  influential in the online communities of practice space.

It looks like the blog is working towards the publication of a book called Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities.

I’ve come across this idea of the ‘stewardship’ of communities before in Wenger’s article Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice. A highly memorable article title and a piece of writing that I’ve returned to time and time again as a touchstone for understanding communities and knowledge management. Don’t leave home without it.

Back to the blog though, and I’m really struck by this post on the Community Orientation Spidergram Activity. Wenger and pals have categorised nine patterns of activity in a community and wrapped them into an activity. The activity can help you to analyse your community’s behaviour so you can focus your stewardship activities, identify which tools and processes you might need to support your community, or plan for the future of your community or reflect on the past.

They’ve also released a chapter of the upcoming book. It’s a very comprehensive ‘action notebook’. With checklists, tables and questions, it takes you through the steps of stewarding technology and outlines what to keep in mind at each step. Could be handy if you’re really starting from the beginning – keen to use social media but not sure why or what.