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?

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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.

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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

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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.”

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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.)

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I think it’s fair to say that there’s some tension between the breadth of the vision in The New Zealand Curriculum and the government’s crusade for literacy and numeracy, which has seen something of a narrowing of focus and funding in the education sector.

What I’ve heard said in some circles is that we’re not leaving the curriculum behind, rather that students need literacy and numeracy to access the curriculum. But how about teaching the curriculum to teach literacy and numeracy? Using the curriculum to genuinely engage with students’ strengths and interests to support literacy learning?

There’s a history of educational resource development across government departments, which serves to advocate for their work and the wider curriculum. Let’s hope it continues – I think it can both support the crusade and the curriculum.

To help out, here’s a video by Professional Daniel Willingham on why teaching content is teaching reading. (Thanks to Artichoke for the link over twitter.)

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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.

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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.

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If it’s good to look outside education for inspiration sometimes (see last post), it’s also great when other sectors get involved with education. The NZTA has worked with the folks at Hooked on Thinking to develop the Feet First curriculum resources: 24 teacher-led and four student-led inquiry topics based around the key understanding ‘walking benefits people, places and the planet’.

As well as linking to The New Zealand Curriculum, the units are designed against the SOLO Taxonomy. There’s great video footage of students from Waikowhai School explaining the SOLO Taxonomy as a framework for questioning and how it applies to their thinking and learning. Wow.

As well as the curriculum resources, there’s also an ‘active travel’ picture book competition. The winning book will be published and distributed to every school library. An illustrator/author/editor will workshop the winning book with the class/group or schools, and the students will be able to take part in a professional book lauch. Entries are due on 3 September. Digital formats are accepted!

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I’ve been so busy with work that I’ve been lacking the processing power for blogging – both reading, writing and commenting. However, I’ve put some effort into Twitter instead and the experience has been great. I’m learning all sorts of interesting things about teaching and learning by following all sorts of interesting education people. 

I’ve also expanded my connections beyond education, which has proved very valuable. For example, a link from Twitter sent me to The Long Now Foundation, which fosters long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. The Long Now is like the slow food movement for thinkers. It’s about thinking about the long term, and it’s also about slower, better thinking. Obviously they intend to be around for a long time.  

They’ve got a bunch of interesting projects and wide-ranging seminars, including the option to place bets and vote on predictions about the future. At the moment, it’s Kevin Kelly’s prediction that “By 2060 the total population of humans on earth will be less than it is today.”

Startling news about the state of my local harbour here in Porirua has got me wondering about whether we need a New Zealand chapter. 

The beauty of things like The Long Now and TEDTalks is that they are broad churches – education is but one of their foci. We need to keep a broad (and long) view when it comes to seeking influences and shaping our own thinking and learning in education. 

Maybe you’re thinking it’s ironic that I got a tweet about The Long Now? Even in 140 characters, I’m finding plenty of evidence of smart, deep thinking in the peeps that I’m following. Thanks, guys!

Here’s a link to 25 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom (also sent to me over Twitter).  I particularly like ideas #2 and #12. It’s been put together by Tom Barrett. 

On the subject of slow, I’ve been meaning to blog about Geetha Narayanan’s article A Dangerous but Powerful Idea – Counter Acceleration and Speed with Slowness and Wholeness. There’s a lot to talk about in this. I’m interested in the idea that our own key competencies – and, indeed, the development of local, school-based curriculum – provide ‘slow’ opportunities for deep, meaningful, engagement and exploration of learning – ‘synchronicity with actual real life processes’. Slow pedagogy.

Geetha says:

The thoughtless and widespread use of technology as the universal solution to the rising need for fast knowledge is wrong and must be questioned. … To me the new digital technologies are tools that allow for learners to develop their imaginations, to be able to play and to have fun, to be able to tell stories in different and exciting ways. But in order to generate value they need to be integrated into new forms and structures in an invisible and contextual manner so that they work slowly and with great finesse to create an unquiet and critical pedagogy – one where new media arts can sustain social change.

Her warning about seeing technology as a solution, without real understanding of the effective pedagogy needed to lead learning experiences, is clearly a message to support. This is why our national curriculum ‘makes sense’ of ICT, as some wise person (apologies for not recalling who it was), said to me the other day.  

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1. Tahatai Coast School – These students are tackling a local issue of concern – reducing traffic congestion. ICT is essential and seamless: data analysis provides the evidence for the students to take action, and they convey their traffic safety messages through television commercials. 

2. Fendalton Open Air School – This story highlights the use of blogging by students to reflect on their own and their classmate’s work, and also for parents to get involved. John Hattie chimes in with support for feedback as the most important factor for student achievement. 

3. Point England School – This video is by students involved in podcasting as part of their literacy programme. A rich demonstration of literacy learning and the key competencies – the students are practiced literary critics, participating in an international community of readers. 

4. Baradene College – A secondary example – students access digital resources from Te Papa’s collection to stimulate the creative process in drama class. ICT provides richer learning opportunities and greater relevance in the learning.

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Check out this video that Nathan sent me of Julian giving us his critical analysis of the latest advert by Microsoft. The politics of it aside, isn’t this is a great example of media analysis – from Julian’s dissection of the agenda behind the messages to his questioning (and verification through research) of the accuracy of the information to the ad’s continuity gaffs?

Julian’s YouTube profile indicates he’s providing video commentary on a range of technologies and popular culture topics, often times in response to requests and feedback from those following him. How can we capitalise on the commitment that these young people have to learning, and to teaching, for that matter, in the classroom!?

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Last week, with the top trio Neil, Cam and Howard, I ran a session for colleagues across the ministry that shared our team’s work. We explored three questions:

1. What is e-learning (and what is not e-learning)?
2. Why is it important?
3. How does it fit in The New Zealand Curriculum?

We got asked some tough questions – questions that we should always be prepared to answer! So I’m going to devote a couple of posts to e-learning FAQs (don’t hesitate to offer up your own frequently asked questions or answers).

Q: e-Learning has nothing new to offer (other than the benefits of evolutionary change – more information, more connections etc).

A: There many justifications for e-learning. These include: young people are digital learners (their social, cultural and ethical practices are digital ones); the workplace and economy requires proficiency with ICT; e-learning can be a lever for teacher pedagogical change; ICT can be used to ‘add value’ (eg when teaching concepts difficult to grasp or to access to a wider range of learning resources and options). These reasons are necessary but not sufficient, to my mind.

The main justification, for me, is that e-learning supports the kinds of curriculum and pedagogies that respond to and shape 21st century society.

The NZ Curriculum says e-learning contributes new ways of teaching and learning (p36 e-Learning and pedagogy). e-Learning offers new approaches to teaching that overcome barriers of distance and time, expand learning beyond the classroom, and provide for more varied and richer learning. These are largely matters of scale and the amplification of effects: e-learning provides for wider and more flexible learning options by making learning quicker, bigger and more varied.

This is not to be sneezed at. An example is the Virtual Learning Network, which connects teachers and students to provide a full range of subjects and teaching expertise to small and rural schools and communities.

What about new learning? Transformative learning that shifts us away from a focus on content goals for their own sake? Learning that ’affirms students’ interests, but also expands them and then demonstrates their significance’ (to quote Craig McDonald, commenting on a previous blog post)?

I’ve used the five key competencies from The NZ Curriculum as a framework for my suggestions for new educational outcomes through e-learning:

• Thinking: We are open to different ways of knowing the world. When we studied chemistry, we were presented with one (therefore, true) model of the atom in our chemistry textbook. Type atom into Google images to see all the ways we represent or model a single phenomenon. [example suggested by Rachel Bolstad.]
• Using language, symbols and text: Our perceptions of the world are constructed through language, symbols and texts. Changes in technology change the ways that we communicate and construct meaning. There are new forms of information and new ways to process and present this information. An example is Hans Rosling, who models and visualises complex data sets to reveal new insights on poverty.
• Managing self: We understand ourselves by bumping up against other people’s values and perspectives. Interacting with communities of learners from other schools on a student inquiry project, as in this one on human rights issues, provides opportunities for learners, in a diverse and challenging setting, to set personal and shared goals, make and adapt plans in achieve those goals, and share and negotiate interpretations and ideas.
• Relating to others: Watching documentary web video on a website like Alive in Baghdad, we hear the varied views and perspectives of Iraqis living in a time of civil war and democratic evolution. We are compelled to relate to others’ views of the world and imagine ourselves in the positions of others, including the journalists doing the reporting.
• Participating and contributing: This competency is about students not just knowing the world but being productive in it, and classrooms are rich with examples of e-learning’s contribution here. In Point England Primary School’s book review podcasts, students are making a real and valued contribution to an international community of readers. They learn the discourse of literary criticism through their immersion in practice – through the act of participating and contributing in a community of literary critics. In the video, the students talk about why e-learning is important to them and what they are learning.

Next: What is the evidence for the impact of e-learning on teaching and learning?

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Time for the funnies! I’ve been watching two hilarious made-for-web series called Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and The Guild.  

These two shows received awards last month at the 1st Annual Streamy Awards. Hosted in Los Angeles by a bunch of new media companies, The Streamys recognise shows produced originally for broadband distribution. The awards herald the rise and rise of web tv. It will be interesting this time next year to revisit the status of this genre, who’s involved, and the nature of the media produced.  

Best Comedy Web Series went to the The Guild – written by and starring Felicia Day as a member of an online gaming community who is forced out from behind her computer screen to confront her fellow game players in the real world.

Audience Choice Award for Best Web Series went to Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Created by Joss Whedon (Serenity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dollhouse) and his family and friends during the writers’ strike, this short series tells of Dr Horrible’s attempts to get accepted into the Evil League of Evil and win the girl of his dreams away from his nemesis, Captain Hammer.

Check out the winners – might be some other interesting media in there for a bit of Easter web tv watching (note: not necessarily suitable for kids).

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I’ve been talking with colleagues about models for digital resources for learners. We have a curriculum with new priorities for learning; we have technologies challenging traditional publishing formats; and we have students who’ve adopted some of those technologies for themselves. These developments should mean big changes for educational publishing.

A few ideas then. Resources for students need to:

1. engage young people’s cultural and social practices
2. provide opportunities for transformative learning (a shift from filling students’ heads with facts to strengthening their key competencies)
3. build teachers’ capability around the seven ‘actions that promote student learning’ (pp34-35 NZC).

Publishers producing resources need to:

1. commission, write, design and curate across the range of media and in multimodal forms (avoiding treating web as an extra add-on to the publishing process)
2. plan for and predict likely interaction (how will young people want to interact? debate amongst themselves? engage with us?)
3. contribute an editorial or curatorial role that influences and creates community (set framing questions? bring people together?).

What do you think?

Learning is always a social experience for learners and their teachers, whether the artifacts involved are chalk, books, ICT and/or other minds. However, in an era when key competencies are at the heart of our curriculum, I think we can look to ICT to support transformative learning in ways that print simply can’t. Digital resources and software (especially, but not exclusively, social software) make available new opportunities for students to do things with their knowledge. Content is a means to this end (doing things with knowledge), not an end in itself.

An example … 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.

There’s a role for the publisher: curating students’ work, modelling cognitive and social processes, influencing teachers’ pedagogical practice (including their own classroom blogging practices), responding to the interests and strengths that students bring to the project …

Do you know of resources that meet the first three principles? I’m keen to test them and find some examples … 

What does this mean for publishers? I’ve been invited to present at the Future of the Book conference on digital educational publishing in June, which is really exciting, so I’m starting to think about it. This great read about the future of newspapers quotes Clay Shirky (I’m an unashamed big fan).  Shirky argues that attempts to protect core institutions are futile in the face of technological disruption:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

The Guardian in the UK is giving us great journalism while breaking away from old organisational forms. Their website doesn’t need a print companion to make sense; it’s more than a digital facelift or supplement; readers can join the fray.

Meg Pickard, The Guardian’s interaction and communities manager (who would have imagined 20, or even 10, years ago that such a role would exist?), spoke at the Webstock conference last month. She said that old online models for content start with and separate the content from the context (eg a news story with a forum off to the side). New, improved models wrap the social experience around the content experience. They tell stories by initiating social experiences and bringing in content in a range of media to support this.

I think The Guardian is getting there. They’ve been able to imagine and implement outcomes that don’t preserve old forms. It’s got me thinking that, if I want to make a useful contribution to the Future of the Book conference, I’d be better to think about the Future of Reading and the Future of Learning. How, what and where are young people going to be reading? How, what and where are young people going to be learning? Exploring this might help us to figure out where next for the book, for learning and for educational publishing.

PS: For a treat, check out how the technology is evolving. This is the Eco Zoo website, demonstrating 3D using the latest version of Flash (v10). It’s even relevant to the discussion above – click on a creature, and then select the pop-up book! If you hold down your mouse, you can swivel around the back of the book … over it etc …  learning opportunities, anyone?

image cc by kennymatic

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