Tech Ed-dy

I’ve been carrying this article called Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth around on my iTouch for a few days and finally had a chance to read it while riding a BC Ferry today.  It’s well worth a read in it’s entirety but the gyst of the article (as I understand it) is that we need to re-think our approach to online safety and move towards an approach that focuses less on negative consequences and more on media literacy and digital citizenship.  In the article, Online Safety 1.0 is characterized as the ‘predator’ danger approach and Online Safety 2.0 as being mostly about the harrasment and cyberbullying that has become prevalent due to the peer-to-peer nature of today’s internet.  Both of these approaches, it claims, are negative, lack context and are largely irrelevant to youth.  Online Safety 3.0 on the other hand they describe as being about enabling …

youth enrichment and empowerment. Its main components – new media literacy and digital citizenship – are both protective and enabling.

They share some interesting findings from the Internet Safety Technical Taskforce which wrapped up in January 2009, including that:

cyberbullying and harassment are the most salient risks youth face, all children aren’t equally at risk, and children’s psychosocial makeup and environment are better predictors of risk than the technology they use.

This may seem obvious to many, but to me it was an eye opener.  Our tendency to focus on the technology (Facebook, MySpace, IM etc) that allows peer-to-peer interactions online has a tendency to make us look at the problem as a ‘one size fits all’ one (students are misusing Facebook, so lets block it in school), when in fact problematic online behaviours are really just problematic behaviours that happen to take place online.  Instead of talking about the technology we should be talking about the behaviours, and the underlying reasons for them; just as we do with real world behaviours.

This gets me thinking about how to get my students to critically think about their online lives and behaviours in a meaningful way.  Often I feel like our conversations are about 2-d solutions to 3-d problems.  My students already know about the 2-d solutions, so much so that they have become buzzwords.  The word “cyberbullying” has become a buzzword and I don’t feel I done a very good job unpacking it with my students.  When I used to be an outdoor educator we had other buzzwords that were equally frustrating, words like “team work” and “communication”.  My students all knew that these words were important and what we were trying to teach them, so they were quick to use them during debriefs.  The really powerful learning came when they were forced to unpack what these words meant in a specific context, or even better when they were put into a situation that really challenged their ability to work as a team and communicate and forced them to re-examine their preconceived notions of what these concepts really meant.  I can’t help feeling like I’m dealing with the same dynamic when it comes to the words “internet safety” and “cyberbullying”.  These have become buzzwords in my students lives and they know enough about them to feel like there is nothing else to really discuss, when in fact there is lots.

This is the second year that my Grade 9 students have participated in the Digiteen Project.  As part of this project they spend some time researching the 9 Elements of Digital Citizenship before deciding on an Action Project to undertake at our school.  This has been a challenging project for me and I am still struggling to figure out why it hasn’t had the impact on my students that I thought it would.  What I am coming to realise is that quite a few of them come into my class feeling like they already know about Internet Safety and they don’t really see how Digital Citizenship is relevant to them.  I wonder if this is because they have spent years having adults talk down to them about these issues, instead of involving them in the discussion.  They say this really well in the article:

And young people themselves need to be part of the discussion, not just to listen and parrot what adults tell them to say, but to help think through the issues, help adults understand the difference between real and imagined dangers, how youth themselves are dealing with the real ones (research shows a good deal of intelligence on their part), and help adults come up with messages that will resonate with their peers.

So the question then is how do I get my students to take this conversation seriously enough to think critically about it and not just fall back on the buzzwords.  One of the models in this article gives me hope, it’s called the ‘Net Effect” and it’s based on a group of characteristics packaged by social media researcher danah boyd that really capture why what we do online is different than what we do face to face:

* Persistence & searchability: the Net as a permanent, searchable archive
* Replicability: the ability to copy and paste from anywhere on the Net, to anywhere online
* Scalability: high potential visibility well beyond the audience you had in mind
* Invisible audiences: never really knowing who’s seeing, reading or watching what you post
* Blurring of public and private: an extension of invisible audiences because boundaries aren’t clear – private from whom?

These seem like very tangible, personal topics to me and possibly just the framework for exploring issues of Digital Citizenship with my students in a way that will get them more involved.

I also keep coming back to this blog post by ben blumsmith on teaching Mathematics.  In it he talks about giving students a problem with an superficial pattern that seems to explain things, but actually doesn’t.  The argument being that the cognitive dissonance that arises when they realise their pre-conceived notions don’t work is enough to get them to delve deeper.  This has got me thinking whether I can come up with some good scenarios (maybe videos, maybe stories) that will challenge my students pre-concieved notions regarding Digital Citizenship and get them to delve deeper?

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A while back I was asked to write a blog post for the TLITE blog about my experiences leading a class of grade 9 students through a Global Collaborative Project called the Digiteen Project.  This post has been bouncing around in my head for a while and in the process has taken a slightly different trajectory than I had originally intended.  The reason is that while this project was definitely worthwhile for my students I think that the process of facilitating the project was even more worthwhile for me.  In particular it exposed me to new web 2.0 tools in safe and supported environment and it jump started my Personal Learning Network to an entirely new level.

Being involved in the Digiteen project gave me insight into what classroom 2.0 looks like.  I could not have gotten this insight without being involved in the nitty gritty of this project and finding solutions to the frustrations and stresses that emerged.  The Digiteen project forced me to stop being a passive consumer of content and to start participating in the conversation and that has been a powerful shift not only in what I am learning but in how I am learning.  As David Warlick recently wrote:

Retooling our classrooms into rich and dynamic learning environments will not be something that you can learn how to do in a workshop.  It’s something that will happen through continued creativity, conversations, sharing, experimenting, reporting, and more conversations.

In my opinion taking the plunge and participating in a Global Collaborative Project is one of the best ways I can think of to truly understand the way that web 2.0 tools are transforming the learning opportunities available to us and our students.  In this post my goal is to give ‘legs’ to this assertion by describing the different opportunities and transformative moments that occured for me during the Digiteen project.

Getting Started

My participation in this project started when I registered with the Flat Classroom Ning.  I had recently read Thomas Friedman’s book and was interested in seeing what this project was all about.  Almost immediately I received a message from Julie Lindsay asking if I was interested in the Digiteen project.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was getting a message from someone that was profiled in The World is Flat!  Of course I jumped at the chance.  I didn’t hear from Julie for a little while about the project and one day I was playing around with Twitter (which I really didn’t understand) and I noticed that I could direct message Vicki Davis, the co-founder of the Digiteen project, so I did.  And she answered almost immediately wondering whether I was interested in helping to edit their Code of Conduct Google Doc.  I use Google Docs in my classroom but this was the first time I actually had a chance to use it as a collaboration tool with people from all over the world.

This was my first introduction to the amazing community of educators that are exploring the possibilities of teaching with web 2.0 tools.  I realised that all I needed in order to get involved was enthusiasm for this kind of learning and a willingness to try new things.

Trying to get all my students registered on the Ning and Wiki

I felt like I had this all under control.  After all I already belonged to a few Nings and had even started my own Ning (with me as the only member).  I had also been using Wikispaces for a while so felt comfortable with the way it worked.  What I hadn’t counted on were the countless difficulties inherent in trying to register an entire class of students for these services.  Not only did I have to figure out how to make linked gmail addresses for all my students so that I could register them, but then I had to figure out how to keep track of all the invites arriving in my mailbox and then I had to get each student to register their unique name and password.  Then I had to try and hold it together when they would come to me the next day to tell me they had forgotten their password.  This took a while and it was messy but by the time the dust settled I certainly understood these applications on a whole different level.

Throughout this process all the teachers involved in this project communicated almost exclusively through our Google Group.  I was really impressed with this simple tool that allowed many threaded conversations to take place in an asynchronous way.  I wasn’t the only teacher struggling to get everyone online and we all tried to help each other through this Group.

First Elluminate Meeting

I was quite concerned about this one.  The first challenge was to figure out what time it was in BC so that I could be online for a meeting that happened at EST (which I hoped was eastern standard time).  I eventually became quite adept at using timezoneconverter.com to quickly figure out if I could make the meeting.  I did my due diligence and tested out Elluminate before the meeting.  In fact I couldn’t make the first meeting so listened to a recording instead (a great feature of Elluminate).  When the time came for my first real synchronous online meeting I logged in and sure enough there were other people there, but when I was asked to speak no one could hear me!  Turns out I had to configure my mic and the other teachers guided me through this procedure using the chat feature built into Elluminate.  Once everything was working I had to figure out this thing called a ‘back channel chat’, that has become a staple of the web 2.0 world.  Trying to listen to the conversation going on, follow the chat and click on the links being offered ALL AT THE SAME TIME was mind boggling, but it got easier with practice.

I had known of Elluminate for a while.  I had even visited their table at a conference and collected their materials a few years back, but I had never actually used it. Being introduced to it by teachers that use it every day and with a reason and purpose was much more educational and meaningful than if I had just been playing around with it.

First attempt at reasoning in a Chat Room and starting a Discussion Thread

I have already blogged about this experience so for the full version of these events read my Digi Teen Stories post.  The short version is that shortly after getting my students on this Ning I came across some inappropriate chat in the chat room.  My first reaction was to delete the chat but then the teacher in me decided I had stumbled across a teachable moment, so I joined the chat.  Trying to convey complex reasoning and arguments in a chat room environment was incredibly frustrating and really illustrated for me the limitations of this particular form of communication.  I eventually resorted to starting a discussion thread on the topic of Digital Etiquette and was amazed at the quality and quantity of thoughtful replies I recieved.  It was really my first ever meaningful online discussion.

I could go on and on and on about the different experiences both I and my students had on the Ning.  I think the point is that by really engaging in a Social Network with my students I started to understand both the power and pitfalls of these spaces and how they could be used in education.  Some of the thinking inspired by these experiences can be found in my blog posts on: Obama, Social Networking, and Digiteen and Digiteen Experiences in the Nearly Now.

First Blog Post commented on by people from around the world

Finally, by taking the plunge and committing to this project I was having experiences that I felt like writing about.  I had started a blog a few months before but hadn’t felt very motivated to write anything.  After all the blogosphere was already full of people writing about everything I was interested in.  When Vicki Davis asked me to write a blog post about my Digiteen experiences I realised that I actually did have something to contribute.   The really neat part was that by being a part of a Global Collaborative Project I already had a small network of colleagues that read my post and wrote thoughtful comments on it, which motivated me to keep on writing.

I think that the lesson here is that if you can build up a small network of peers interested in the same stuff before you blog then you start with a small audience already, and if you know that a few people are actually reading what you write you are much more motivated to continue.

I plan on staying involved with the Digiteen project for the long haul.  I think it has really great potential as a model for how we can really teach our students about Digital Citizenship.  There will be a new project starting in April, feel free to contact me through this blog if you are interested in participating.

In a few days I am going to have a chance to present to our parent body on the subject of Digital Literacy.  My presentation is going to be on the heels of a longer presentation about Literacy in general.  I am excited about this opportunity and feel like the timing couldn’t be better.  We are about to launch our new school intranet based on Wordpress, the teachers are all starting to experiment with blogs and the entire ed tech community seems to be buzzing with great thoughts regarding Digital Literacy.  Here is the description of what I am supposed to be talking about:

The second part will focus on the digital literacy skills your children should be developing so that they can become safe and productive members of our increasingly digital society.  Parents will hear about digital literacy projects Aspengrove School is currently involved with and discuss how parents can help foster these skills at home.

I am finding that my biggest challenge right now is in sorting through all the buzz in my head in order to put together a presentation that will be both eye opening and empowering.  My hope is that by writing my thoughts about this presention down as a blog post I will be able to make my own sense out of all the conversations I have been eavesdropping on.

Part 1: Setting the Stage

I have decided that the main message I want parents to leave the presentation with is that the nature of information today has changed and that we need to add some more Literacy tools to their children’s Literary toolbox so that they are able to interact with digital information in constructive ways.  To get this message across I plan on doing the following:

• Introduce them to the new nature of information by looking at Wikis and Wikipedia and have a discussion about whether they would trust the information on Wikipedia.  After this I will tell them about the study comparing Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Britannica and about Pluto still being a planet in paper based Encyclopedias.  I will show them the discussion and history tabs in Wikipedia and introduce them to the idea of learning and knowledge as a conversation, rather than as a static thing.
• Following on this I will give them the URL of the wiki I have created as a resource for them parents21c.wikispaces.com and explain that I hope this will be a place we can start to share resources regarding Digital Literacy.

Next I want to find a good Presentation Zen way to present the following quote (I still need to find the original source, I got it from the newliteracy wiki), which I want to use to illustrate how radically the nature if information is changing.

In 2006, 5 million gigabytes of new information were added to the world and of that only .01% was printed.

Following on this quote I want to transition to the idea that the way information has changed is having a dramatic impact on the world we are trying to prepare their children for.  I like the following quote,

For the first time in history, our job as educators is to prepare our students for a future that we cannot clearly describe.

This next part is the tricky one.  I want to use this idea that with the future being so uncertain Literacy (both traditional and digital) is vitally important if their children are going to be able to function and participate in the information rich world around them.  I  like this quote from Marshall McLuhan about the ‘rear-view mirror effect’,

We see the world through a rear-view mirror.  We march backwards into the future.

I want the parents to come away from this presentation willing to stop looking backwards at some of the ways that they learned and be able to think openly about the new things that their kids need to learn to be successful in the future.

Part 2: Sharing a Framework for moving forward

I have to admit that while I have been fascinated by the current online conversations on Literacy and documents like the Jenkins White Paper and the MacArthur New Media study I have had a hard time figuring out how to turn this conversation into a working plan I can use in my classroom.  So instead I have decided to introduce Digital Literacy to the parents with this graphic.

I am comfortable with these three different aspects of Digital Literacy because they are all incorporated in my current curriculum to some extent and as such I have relevant examples I can share with the parents.  I am not sure that the Venn Diagram is the best representation, but I like that it shows overlap between the different skills.

Access and Critically Analyse Online Information

I plan to introduce this aspect of Digital Literacy by sharing some of Alan November’s work.  In particular I have found that the REAL strategy he recommends is the most effective tool I have found for quickly determining whether you can trust the information on a website.

To make sure that the parents really understand each of these steps AND the importance of being able to verify the accuracy of information online I will take them through an evaluation of www.martinlutherking.org.

This will be the most hands on part of the presentation and I am a little worried about the trade off between the time it will take and the benefit but I think it is important that people going away feeling like they have learned something they can use right away.  To that effect I am also thinking of taking a minute to show them how to toggle SafeSearch in Google.

Engage in Safe and Constructive Social Networking

This is a part of the presentation that I am really looking forward to because it is the piece I have been thinking about a lot lately as a result of my experiences in the Digiteen project.  The message that I want parents to get from this part of the presentation is that they can`t expect that their children just know how to be safe online because they seem so tech savvy, and that they best way to keep them safe is to engage them in conversation about their online experiences.  One of my experiences in the Digiteen Ning involved coming across innapropriate behaviour in a chat room conversation.  My first reaction was to just delete the chat and exert my teacher “control”, which is I think what a lot of parents want to know “how do I control my childs internet use”?  While there are certainly a number of things a parent can do like making sure the family computer is in a public space in the end they will very likely be out maneuvered if what they want to do is try and control the situation.  This is illustrated really well in some of the Growing Up Online videos produced by PBS.

On the other hand the Digiteen Ning provided me with the tools to set up an asynchronous online discussion about Digital Etiquette as a response to the chat room behaviour and I was absolutely amazed at the number and quality of the responses I recieved.  Similarly I think that for the parents in my presentation to really keep their children safe online they have to take and interest in their online lives and make sure the channels of communication are open.

I would love to wax eloquent about the power of Personal Learning Networks but I think that will have to wait until another time.  Still I feel that there is a piece missing here.  If I am going to talk about Social Networking as a part of Digital Literacy then being able to learn from a network and create a network are an important piece.  Maybe  I can give them Vicki Davis’s latest article in Educause.  I am also thinking of handing out Will Richardson’s article from Educational Leadership entitled ‘Footprints in the Digital Age‘ in an effort to get them thinking about managing their children’s digital footprint instead of trying to ignore it.

Know How to Create and Share Knowledge

I am thinking about showing them this video on the New Media Literacies as a way to show that being able to interact with digital information and communicating what you know by producing more content is another aspect of literacy.  I’m still not sure if this is the best video, my other option is Learning to Change – Changing to learn.

For this section I want to emphasise that the PROCESS of creation is as if not more important than the technical skills involved.  I will talk briefly about the IB MYP Design Cycle and how I am using it in my Technology classes and then I think I will talk about Chris Craft’s Life Round Here 2009 Project which my grade 6’s will be participating in this year.  I might show one of the Photostories they made last year.

Part 3: What’s Next.

Finally I will wrap up by encouraging them to visit the Wiki I have created.  I am also going to start a blog on our private intranet in which I will highlight projects being done at the school that include Digital Literacy skills.

And that’s it.  If you have actually read this far all I can say is WOW.  I would really appreciate comments and feedback of all varieties as I really want this presentation to be a stepping stone on the way to our school becoming a real 21st century school.

I have just finished marking my student’s reflections from last years Digiteen project and am feeling a need to write my own reflection on the project.  In general I was happy with how the project went in my class.  My students learned a lot about web 2.0 communication and collaboration skills, and in some areas their thinking was challenged and learning took place.  In other ways, however, I felt like they were just going through the paces and weren’t authentically engaged in the experience.  When I read through their reflections an obvious thread is that they found the Ning networking experience to be very engaging and empowering, while the Wiki editing experience was not as fruitful.  I have been thinking quite a bit lately about the power of Personal Learning Networks and how they could be introduced in my classroom and I have started to wonder whether there might be a place in the Digiteen project for the Ning to be more front and center in the learning process.

I keep coming back to a recorded breakfast conversation between David Warlick and Steve Dembo that I recently listened to on the way to work.  In it David refers to students needing to learn how to ‘mine the conversation’ and suggests that teachers today need to be ‘master learners’.  These sound bites have really stuck with me as more and more this has become how I learn.  I follow Twitter links and scan my rss reader to find parts of the conversation that relate to my needs and interests and when something catches my attention I drill down deeper bookmarking sites in delicious to come back to and taking notes using google notebook or by pasting them into a wiki.  This has been the most powerful learning experience of my life.  Could we replicate this in a classroom setting using Ning?  If we did it might look something like this:

• Before starting the project all the teachers involved teach their students about tags, rss and get them set up with a feed reader.
• Each student is then assigned the task of becoming an expert on one of the  9 elements of digital citizenship.
• Each expert must review and post a summary of maybe 3 different resources to their blog and tag the posts with tags related to their summaries so that they are searchable.
• Each student then subscribes to feeds from the experts that they think will provide them with the information they need to help them with their final presentations.  There could be an expectation that students comment on each other’s blog posts so that they all get peer feedback.
• There could also be a discussion group started for each topic and the experts on that topic could be assigned the task of starting a discussion thread and moderating the discussion.  The groups could be where students  go to post
  questions in the discussion forum.
  These questions could then be the start of a richer discussion about the
  different aspects of each topic (especially if teachers also join in once in a
  while) and hopefully that these richer discussion would lead to more balanced student perspectives.

I’m thinking I ought to try this within one of my classes to see how it might work.

There have been a bunch of thoughts swirling around in my head over the past week that I really have to write down so that I can move on to other things.  My experiences as a teacher involved in the Digiteen Project this year have gotten me thinking alot about how to engage teenagers in meaningful discussion about how they interact online.  While I had these thoughts swirling around in my brain I listened to an interesting and maybe somewhat related podcasts.

The story was about my.barackobama.com or myBO.  I might get my facts a little mixed up but the gist of the story was about an incident this summer when a large group of Obama’s supporters disagreed with the way he voted on a particular issue to do with Phone Service providers and Phone Tapping.  They formed a group on myBO in opposition to his vote on this issue.  What I think was amazing is that Obama had three of his advisors go on the social network and they spent 3 hours taking questions from this group and explaining why he voted the way he did.

What I think is significant about this from the perspective of using social networks in education is the way dissenting opinions were engaged, not shut down.  Often as a teacher I find that my first reaction when faced with a situation that I am uncomfortable with or that I think might be troublesome is to use my teacher ‘power’ to shut down the situation, thus making it difficult for much learning to take place.  There is certainly a time and place where this type of response is appropriate, but I am becoming more and more convinced that the way to help our students learn the skills they need to safely and competently navigate online social realtionships is to be willing to engage them in dialogue.  Even if it is difficult.

This year I decided my grade 9 class would join the Digi Teen project, an amazing global collaborative project dreamed up by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay. As participants in this project my grade 9 technology class is engaged in researching different aspects of digital citizenship and collaborating with peers from other countries to edit Wiki pages. They are also participating in a Ning Educational Network within which they can get to know their teammates and other students from around the world. It is the experiences both I and my students are having on this Ning that I want to share.

Story 1 – “The teacher and the chat room”

I was the most nervous about involving my students in the Ning as I knew that it had potential to ring alarm bells with the parent community at my small private school on Vancouver Island, and I took pains to do my due diligence in informing parents and having conversations with my students around issues of personal and private information, digital etiquette stereotypes. I also made sure to check in on the Ning periodically to make sure everything was ok.

During one of these visits I stumbled upon the Ning chat room and realised that somewhere around the world there was a class of students on the Ning and in the chat room. Most of the chat seemed to be the students saying hello to each other in various ways, but a couple of the comments were quite inappropriate. So, being an administrator on the Ning I did what I thought was best and deleted the chat immediately.

But the comments kept coming and I was pretty sure that some of the were meant to be hurtful to others. So I decided to join the chat. Heart racing I entered a comment something like ‘Hey guys I’m a teacher over here in Canada and I’m concerned that some of what you are typing isn’t very appropriate”. I knew it sounded pretty stuffy but was at a loss to express myself properly in such a limited medium. As was expected l got some quick replies along the lines of ‘we are just having a bit of fun’. So I started typing away trying to express myself when I started getting replies of a much different nature. More apologetic and thoughtful.

What had happened was that their teacher in Australia had gotten wind of the chat and had taken the opportunity to talk to the class about it. What a learning opportunity! To follow up I started a discussion thread on the Ning asking ‘Where do you draw the line between having fun online and being innapropriate’. And I was really pleased to see some of the thoughtful replies posted by some of those Australian students.

So what is the take away lesson from this experience. I think it is that there is a lot of value in allowing students to make mistakes in an environment like the Ning where they can make mistakes and learn from them. I was nervous about the Ning component of this project because of the potential for my students to make mistakes on a public site, but if they are never given a chance to really fully participate in real world experiences then how are they ever going to learn how to navigate these experiences successfully.

Story 2 – “The war in Iraq”

This story is much shorter. One of my students started a discussion thread on the Iraq war. A tricky discussion to have when schools from both the USA and Middle East are involved in the project. The response she received from a girl in Quatar was incredibly mature and balanced. You can find it here if you are interested.

This short story has really reinforced for me the power of these global collaborative projects, and it’s not over yet. I wonder what other teachable moments and wonderful connections will happen next?