SocialTech

Education for a digital generation

Image: 'Franci plays maze' by Nico Cavallotto

Demos, the UK thinktank 'for everyday democracy', released Their Space: Education for a digital generation, written by Hannah Green and Celia Hannon on January the 11th, and available as a free CC licensed download. For the edtechs amongst you it offers a good overview to the national policy level approach the UK is increasingly adopting. For the non-digital, it provides an introduction of some the key ideas currently informing calls for educational reform.   

The increasing recognition and consensus that digital literacy is something that needs to be mainstreamed is obviously a welcome one. The authors take a practical, moral-panic defusing approach to the reality of new technologies and practices, focusing on participation and economic arguments.

The brief glossary  features more commercial services (ie Facebook) than it does tools (eg blogs) and some of the entries are debatable.

Chapter two, Myths and misconceptions, is handy, and rehearses a few discussions that will be familiar to people working in education and trying to promote a positive view of young peoples use of technology.

Chapter 5, The world has changed so why haven't we? is a bit of a mish-mash. It aims to "lay out a set of opportunities and challenges for the government and for school leaders and their staff", most of which are familiar and aren't particularly well resolved here - informed leadership, better staff development, a more relevant and integrated approach to ICT as a subject, access for disadvantaged learners, parental involvement, a re-evaluation of the assessment system, greater learner involvement (dynamic (or deep) personalisation, as I've characterised it).

Personal Learning Environments get a mention in the guise of the 'Creative Portfolio'. A little weirdly, the authors final two "opportunities and challenges" are classroom wikis and Del.icio.us. I've got nothing against either tool or site, and I know that loads of educational professionals have found effective uses for wikis, other collaborative tools, and social bookmarking sites. It seems incongruous to be promoting particular services at policy level in the context of a document which has clearly articulates the fast moving state of play. 

EdTech activism

The recent Florida Educational Technology Conference blogger meetup seems to have stirred up some hi-octane interest in edublog lobbying to  “make education and read/write technology a social/economic priority”, and for working towards the political mainstreaming of educational transformation which embeds new social technologies and practices (software, networks, media production and sharing).

Christopher Sessums outlines the US edubloggers embryonic manifesto in ‘Why the future needs us: educational reform, collaboration and social action”, and co-conspirator Will Richardson pitches in with A Call to…?

Focusing on the next US election is an interesting strategy, and one that might well provide some useful models and lessons for other countries. I’m interested in what a US-wide organization is going to look and work like, how it might influence and collaborate with other emerging social and educational tech associations, and very much looking forward to hearing more info on the planned June Stateside edubloggercon.

A whole bunch has happened since last June, when we held the UK’s first edublogger conference. There will be a formal announcement shortly about the new grass-roots, independent UK organization, Future Learning Online (FLO) which has emerged from a series of on and offline events, meetups, and conversations taking place over the past few years between educational bloggers, technologists, developers, IT support staff, librarians, consultants, researchers, teachers, post-grad students, trainers and many other people who don’t fit easily into these, or any single, role. We’ll be holding our next annual conference in June as well - so it’s shaping up to be an interesting summer. 

Stop complaining, be modern

Thanks to Glyn Wintle, Open Rights Group regular, for this link to the Action on Rights of Children (ARCH) blog post 'Can't you just be modern?'

The post replies to an article by David Walker in Wednesday's Guardian which suggests that mistrust of data sharing practices is erroneously based on an assumption that the UK government is the evil empire.

Check out the ARCH sidebar while you're there for some nice linkfo.

Mobile ubiquity

Image: 'thats why they call it work' taken by cactusbones

I was talking to some undergrad students recently about all the uses we had for our mobile phones. Actually making phone calls was way down on most lists – right up the top were alarm clock, calendar (synced with online or desktop calendar), texting, taking and sharing pictures, and filming and watching clips. Checking email, going online, and using sat-nav to get home after drunken parties were all there too. Listening to music showed up.

So I was interested to read this 27 year-olds day-with-the-phone in Japan. Posted over at electro-plankton in reply to the recent US iPhone-fever, the post puts the additional features (mainly Mobile digital TV and increased consumerism ops) down to Japanese phone developers working with the countries only two network providers:

"Claude's typical day starts with him checking his email on his phone. He gets all his daily tasks and calendaring events this way. He then syncs it with his computer. He pays for the subway by placing the phone on a kiosk granting him access past the gates. The commute is spent watching TV on his phone by rotating the screen. A small antenna extends up and catches the wireless digital TV signals (something we will never have here in America). About 45 minutes later, he's in Tokyo and heads to a vending machine to buy fresh fruit and water. He places the phone up against a pad. The vending machine reads his bank information which is tied into his phone. He then places his thumb on the phone's tiny thumbprint reader to verify his identity. As he makes his way to the office, he waves the phone near the door handle to unlock it. During a 10 minute break, he's flips thru a magazine and sees something he wants to buy. The item has a tiny stamp size barcode pictogram next to it. He scans the pictogram with his phone. A receipt and shipping confirmation hits his email minutes later. As the day ends, he syncs with his work computer and goes grocery shopping paying for items with his phone. Before heading home, he heads to a bar his friend has invited him too. He uses the phone to give him step-by-step directions. The day is finally over and his phone's battery is nearing the end of its life. He plugs it in and goes about the rest of the evening relaxing before bed."

Emerge

As George Roberts posted earlier today, the Emerge project JISC bid to support the Users and Innovation strand of the capital programme was successful.

I went along to the formal interview with George (Oxford Brookes), Chris Fowler (Essex), Michael Gardner (Essex) and Steven Warburton (Kings College London) on Thursday, where we had a really productive discussion and got very excited about the project again. 

My role will be focusing on supporting JISC's community of practice by providing appropriate infrastructure and tools, and ensuring that support and training is designed around the needs of group members. 

I'm very much looking forward to working with Team Elgg, since we will be using an Elgg network to support the community members as appropriate (a lot of the flesh of the project, including tools and services, are going to depend on user need and preference) and as a base for the project management. Elgg was the obvious choice for me for a bunch of reasons, but in particular:

• It's open source and supports a number of open standards. The January to June roadmap points up a lot of interesting new developments, including OpenID.
• Elgg has been designed to support distributed practices and user choices. This means that people in the group can choose to work where and how they want to, in small or large groups, or as individuals. We'll be able to support the connections they want to make using the platform, and provide a great entry point into networks of practice.
• Relational granularity/Smart networking: posts, resources, and even elements of profiles can be public, shared amongst groups of any size, or private.

Entirely appropriately, while I was over at elgg.net checking out George's post, I stumbled over another just-up post from Sam Rose, which pointed in the direction of a very interesting piece by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale.

2007 Horizon Report

The 2007 Horizon Report is now available (pdf). The 2007 edition is a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.

Back in August I was invited to serve on the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project Advisory Board. The job of the Board, a small multi-disciplinary group of thinkers from both within and outside higher education, has been to provide vision and stimulus to the Horizon Project, and to inform the annual Horizon Report. The official release takes place on Monday 22 January, at the Education Learning Initiative annual meeting in Atlanta USA. 

The Advisory Board workspace wiki site is password-free, and available to anyone interested in the process that the group went through to check out.

"The New Media Consortium (NMC) Emerging Technologies Initiative focuses on expanding the boundaries of teaching, learning and creative expression by creatively applying new tools in new contexts. The Horizon Project, the centerpiece of this initiative, charts the landscape of emerging technologies and produces the NMC’s annual Horizon Report.

The 2007 Horizon Report highlights six technologies that the underlying research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years.

A central focus of the discussion of each technology is its relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression. Live weblinks to example applications are provided in each section, as well as to additional readings.

Download the 2007 Horizon Report (285K, 32 pp).   

The 2007 Horizon Report  has been released with a Creative Commons License and may be freely replicated and distributed for noncommercial purposes provided that it is distributed only in its entirety."

   

5 things meme

Image: 'Tag' by R. Motti

Al Upton tagged me at the end of December, and I've finally gotten round to posting something. My approach has just been to blog the first 5 things that most people are unlikely to know about me that came to mind, briefly. However, I'm slightly depressed that out of the 5, 3 demonstrate my geeky-to-the-core credentials, 1 relates to my hippy upbringing, and 1 is inexplicable, even to me. I'm really hoping that most people know that I do have good social skills.

1.    I’m a film junkie and a couple of years ago I was filing a brief weekly slot about tech in movies over at Engadget. That put me off ever wanting a career in mainstream blogging.

2.    I’m a big comics fan too, especially Love & Rockets. When I was a teenager Alan Martin put a toon version of me into his Planet Swerve series.

3.    If we had an annual family holiday when I was a kid, it was always to Glastonbury Music Festival.

4.    I spend a lot of time playing computer games with my son. I especially like shoot em ups, and Phoenix Wright.

5.    I have a phobia about tiny, Borrower-sized people.

I tag Régine Debatty: check out her 5 things here

Catherine Howell: one of my favorite 5 things posts so far 

Henry Jenkins: his 5 things can be found here

Dave Tosh, and  David  Wilcox.

Guardian profiles the 2006 Edublog Awards

Ace tech reporter Steve O'Hear contacted me about covering the Edublog Awards for the Guardian this year, and the resulting article, The best of the blogs appeared today.

A lot of the interview, as usual, didn't make it to the final cut - but luckily for me I blog! So here are the offcuts for anyone else interested in recycling content.

What is the aim of the edublogger awards?

There are three main aims behind the awards:

1. They provide an opportunity for an international community who are interested and involved in scholarly and education based blogging a chance to come together as a community, have fun, discover new ways of using blogging to support learning, and highlight the wealth of fantastic work going on around the world.

2. They provide an amazing resource for those involved in or thinking about using social software and user generated content sites to support education communities of all kinds. They also demonstrate the diverse use to which blogs, wikis, pod casts etc can be put to our nominees showcase contributions from infant school pupils to Professors, and everything in between.

3. As a community of education professionals who understand the use of new technologies, we are using the awards to demonstrate that new technologies can be used in positive, powerful, safe and transformative ways. We want to argue against the moral panic that threatens the innovative and creative uses of technologies, most recently apparent in the US’s DOPA proposals. The message we’re sending out is pretty clear in that regard – digital literacy and social participation, for our students, staff and institutions, is the way to address potential dangers – not banning access to tools that are perceived as potentially threatening.

Who organised / runs the awards?

I’ve convened the awards for the last two years, taking over from Incorporated Subversion’s James Farmer, an Australian-based Online Education and Training/Social Software guru, who runs edublogs.org – a free blog service for education workers. I also received invaluable Awards ceremony assistance from Jeff Lebow (US) and Dave Cormier (Canada) from the Worldbridges webcasting initiative.

What do you make of the winners, any personal highlights?

Time moves fast on the internet, and it’s interesting that most of this years winners can be characterized as second generation edubloggers – bloggers who have been inspired and guided by the pioneers of educational blogging – for example Stephen Downes, Anne Davis, and Will Richardson, (although edublogging luminaries Barbara Ganley and David Warlick did both make it to the finals). Along with so many new faces it was also great to see edublogs and projects from so many different countries being put forward.

Christopher D. Sessums, Director of the Office of Distance Education for the College of Education at the University of Florida, won best Individual Blog this year, and I’m a big fan of his work – he was one of the most popular winners we’ve had to date.

The Polar Science 2006 teams work is pretty exemplary – they won best Group Blog for their Polar Science collaborative learning environment which allows teachers and students, (aged 8-18), to take part first-hand in the research of Dr. Shane Kanatous and his “Ice Team” in Antarctica, and Canadian biophysicist, Dr. Thomas Hawke and his “Lab Team” in Toronto, Canada.

I also awarded a conveners prize this year – the Edublog Star Award, to a blog that ran in April and May this year to document the short-lived adventures of a duck and her egg at a US school, A Duck with a Blog. I love how the school community has used the technology to create a focused resource, sharing pictures, writing and photographs – it’s a really wonderful example of how blogs can be mobilized to facilitate and extend learning communities and opportunities. And it isn’t precious or time consuming – the blog was just used for a few weeks, for a specific purpose, which it serves brilliantly.

How do you think edublogging has progressed since last year (or the early years)?

Edublogging has come a long way! Both tools and practices have proliferated, and there has been an explosion of practice at individual, group and institutional level. Educators are increasingly seeing the benefits of using the whole range of new media – blogs, audio and video files, web feeds, wikis and social networking sites – tools which are easier than ever to use.

I think educators could do with a lot more support in terms of face to face training and in-house resources – the edublogging community have been extremely busy providing a wealth of support material and advice, but it’s not necessarily easy for people new to the technologies to track down the examples and information they need.

I’ve been working hard this year to lobby for the inclusion of social software training in Initial Teacher Training, in Continuous Professional Development and for education leaders and managers. It’s vital that our learners are properly supported in developing their skills – most of them use social networking sites, games, instant messaging, and mobile phones and regard these as basic tools. We need to ensure that we are supporting them to use them creatively, safely and responsibly.

Has UK edublogging stalled? If so, why is that?

UK edublogging hasn’t stalled at all – it’s growing from strength to strength. That it is doing so however has be largely dependent on the commitment, passion and energy of individual teachers, researchers, librarians and educational professionals, who are able to see how to take advantage of distributed networks to create formal and informal learning opportunities.

There are increasingly examples of whole institutional use of social software, the campus wide implementation of Elgg at the University of Brighton is a great illustration of cutting-edge practice happening in UK education.

We still have a level of mistrust and misunderstanding of new technologies that has resulted in institutions and regional providers blocking access to sites that they consider to have no educational value. I’m unconvinced that this actually prevents anyone except for teaching staff – who are precisely the ones who need to know how these sites work and what their potential is – from visiting them.

e-Safety, ongoing

Andy Carvett pushed DOPA's death certificate into edublogland at the end of last year in an excellent overview of the political sea-change taking place stateside recently:

"Meanwhile, Rep. Fitzpatrick was finding himself in a close re-election race back home, giving him less time to lobby his Senate colleagues in support of DOPA. It turned out his efforts were futile - Fitzpatrick lost his re-election bid in November. He wasn’t alone. Three of DOPA’s co-sponsors - JD Hayworth, Sue Kelly and Curt Weldon - also lost their re-election bids.

But the final nail in DOPA’s coffin came with the switch of Congress from Republican to Democrat. Legislation that doesn’t get signed into law by the end of a congressional term has to start from scratch during the next term. In January, the Democrats will be in charge of both houses of Congress, and there’s no sign that they’re going to rush and re-introduce DOPA. Key DOPA critics in the House and Senate, including Reps Ed Markey, John Dingell and Sen. Patrick Leahy, will soon be in leadership positions. With the Republican losses in November, it will be harder for their caucus members to re-introduce DOPA, especially since Fitzpatrick is gone and they lacked Democrat co-sponsors in the first place."

 

However much evidence and experience we have of the importance of technology (particularly social software and user generated content sites and tools) for formal and informal learning, citizenship and participation ('voice and choice'), for creativity and innovation, DOPA pointed up the retrograde potential of one well placed moral panic.

It's clear that withdrawing public access means that the least confident and most economically disadvantaged users - those who most need school and community networks to be able to get online - are the ones who suffer the greatest impact of blocking policies. However obvious or compelling the arguments seem to be to those of us who are familiar with social software, networks and tools, the lesson is - everything continues to be provisional. We need to continue to develop our positions and our strategies.

Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, contributed one of the key arguments to the debate, MySpace and Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), a discussion with Social Media Researcher danah boyd.

Over at Henry's own blog, you can read a two-part interview with Anne Collier, who runs US-based Net Family News, a Childnet International partner:

"Collier also recently published a significant book dealing specifically with social network sites and young people, MySpace Unraveled: What It Is and How to Use it Safely, and so many of my questions here are designed to draw her out about the specific issues surrounding children's involvement with Web 2.0."

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part One)
"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part Two)

 

Placeblogger

 
Center for Citizen Media luminary and Lisa Williams launched Placeblogger on January 1st, an OPLM directory of (predominantly, but not exclusively) US placeblogs. What's a placeblog? From the site FAQ:

"A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism
It’s about the lived experience of a place"

I took my son to the Leicester in Cardboard last year, a genius exhibition put together by Leicester based art collective DOT, which pretty much recreated Leicester in cardboard. We very much enjoyed acting like Godzilla amongst a mini-version of child's hometown, but my favorite part had to be the Royal Infirmary (birthplace of child) which was covered in visitors tales of their own and others pain (most of which were pretty hilarious). I know there are a few projects around which are investigating innovative ways of creating (and redefining) local histories, narratives and networks - the most interesting of these are using various forms of geotagging and MoSoSo - Mobile Social Software. 

I'm kind of more interested in the social layers of space and place that might result from placeblogging, but I like the concept of placeblogging as a specialized form of activity, and I'd be interested to test out the different kinds of ways it could be used within communities. & if someone entertaining enough started blogging about my area, I'd certainly be a regular reader. 

Jay Rosen, a site advisor on the Placeblogger launch

From the 7 August 2006 Citizen Journalism Unconference:
Lisa Williams Placeblogs session notes

Lisa Williams panel overview from the 5 October 2006 Citizens Media Summit II