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:
- engage young people’s cultural and social practices
- provide opportunities for transformative learning (a shift from filling students’ heads with facts to strengthening their key competencies)
- build teachers’ capability around the seven ‘actions that promote student learning’ (pp34-35 NZC).
Publishers producing resources need to:
- 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)
- plan for and predict likely interaction (how will young people want to interact? debate amongst themselves? engage with us?)
- 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
Eco Zoo is Supa Cool !!!
yep- if >> “Journal of Young People’s Writing were a blog” << and was used in the way you describe …
then the potential for connecting with the key competencies would be increased markedly
simply because competencies are more visible/audible (and therefore discussable and teachable) in the course of a process than in the consideration of a product
I like the distinction between process and product, Ed. Do our products needs to be processes, now? I think so!
I’d also like to add a comment about the role of the technology people in all this – the multimedia and web designers and developers.
From my exeprience, online publishing is a partnership between the best educational ideas and the best technology ideas.
We’ve so fully internalised the technology of the book that publishers can leave their conversations with the printer until four weeks before the book is due in the warehouse.
Not so with the web. It’s specialist; it’s complex; it’s changing constantly. Getting the best technology people around the table from the start will reduce our chances of reproducing the old forms online.
The old way of publishing students writing and putting it up on the walls of the classroom is giving way to the new way of publishing and putting it up on the walls of the world.
I teach 7&8 year olds. I publish their writing to our class blog. Their audience is now unlimited! And, unlike traditional paper publishing, their parents, siblings, grandparents and others can comment on their writing – how fantastic is that!
Not only are the students excited, their parents are too.
I am very much in favour of publishing the Journal of Young People’s Writing as a blog. This is so much more in keeping with how young people want to share their outcomes now.
I have been spending some of Easter cleaning out the cupboards of Uni aged kids heading of flatting. One of the ‘artifacts’ unearthed was an early edition of Journal of Young People’s Writing – which contained a piece of writing and an illustration from my 18yr old. It was heading for the recycling bin when I rescued it. I was asked, “Do you REALLY think anyone other that you and I read it Mum?”
Well, if it had have been published on a blog we would have had much more idea wouldn’t we!
(And I saved the journal and tucked it away!)
Hi Sarah, Jo, Dorothy ! Hooray!
What a lovely blog. I really must read number three listed in the post…
;-)
regards,
David
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