The National Education Technology Plan (.pdf) reads like a somewhat random mix of concepts that have been discussed in various blogs and forums over the last decade: connected learning, 21st century skills, data-driven improvement, learning networks, life-wide learning, etc. Nothing new here. What is new, however, is the organization publishing the document: U.S. Department of Education. Many a school reformer, conference presenter, and consultant – not to mention tech companies – will be salivating over this report.
The drawback is the approach taken – if you proclaim connected, collaborative learning is the future, then why not demonstrate it in how you create the report? Why not collaborate rather than deliver it whole? The difficulty with connected learning is that it’s almost impossible to understand unless you directly experience it. And, it’s always easier to talk about it than it is to practice it.
I’ve posted a rough summary of my talk at TEDxNYED on my connectivism site: Collapsing to Connections
TEKRI is hosting a conference on Making Sense of Social Media in Education, Government, and the Enterprise, April 25-26 in Edmonton. Dave Snowden is our keynote speaker.
We are issuing a call for presentations. Deadline is March 21.
The conference will run two days – Sunday is a social media bootcamp: a quick way to get up to speed on various emerging technologies and implications for organizations. Monday is the more typical conference day – keynote, panels, presentations.
With full awareness of growing criticism of TED conference (see D’Arcy Norman’s post on the topic and the growing discussion thread), I’ll be presenting at TEDxNYED on Saturday, March 6 with this group of presenters. The entire day will be live streamed and should be accessible from here. I’ll post on my Twitter account as the day progresses.
Web 2.0 hype has subsided, largely replaced with terms like “social media”. Adding a “2.0″ to anything dates it – immediately. Because it’s just a matter of time before someone comes along and says “3.0″. Defining software by version number i.e. x.0 makes sense because software is bounded. Windows 98 shares some features with Vista, but overall, it’s a distinct piece of software. Real life – like learning – can’t be reduced to a bounded entity like software, making “2.0″ versions largely useless as a means of communicating unique elements. Which is why articles like this – Web 3.0 promises changes for libraries – are disappointing. On the one hand, the concepts being discussed are important: blending virtual/physical worlds, 3D technologies, semantic web, and real-time web. But, the language used to describe these trends (web 3.0) is not helpful as it casts an air of hype. Naming things is difficult; a fine line exists between capturing the essence of change…and between becoming buzzword-based hype.
Patti Anklam takes a quick look at the various ways in which the word “social” is used to define everything from technology to media to architecture to businesses. I appreciate the attempt to provide clarifying review of popular uses of social terms. Something critical is being overlooked in this: nothing is in itself social. Media is not social. It becomes social as we use it to form and create connections.
As Bruno Latour notes, researchers and theorists have long held the view that social is like ether – it exists and is something that we basically just “plug into”. This isn’t an accurate view – you can’t describe an object of study by the element that you are choosing to study it with (i.e. “social” – as Latour puts it, sociologists have mistaken the answer for the question – they assume what ought to be the object of study). The social realm is not pre-existing. Social is not a thing that we add to a tool or an organization. The social realm is one that is created – grown and pruned – through connections and interactions. It is a fluid continually shifting concept. As a result, we literally cannot have social media or social businesses. The ether doesn’t exist. Only the connections do.
Sounds similar to what I suggested with TEKL – Your personal memory device : “It will happen some day. It is inevitable. In the near future, someone will decide to record every moment of a human life from birth to death in digital storage…Data captured by the PMD [personal memory device] would be linked over the internet into distributed software services like GPS, Google Maps, facial recognition, speech/text recognition, brainwave analysis and so on. It would create an ongoing record of the people, terrain, and objects in your vicinity.”
Technology is fun when it thrills us, gives us choice, entertains us, or even distracts us. But when technology starts to replace us (not physical work, but what we think is our unique domain: the mental life), we start to get a little concerned. What does it mean to be human? Is conscious memory our unique province? Can the experience of being human – qualia – possibly exist in a technological device or memory card?
A researcher has announced that, after “analyzing 130 research reports on more than 130,000 subjects worldwide”, he is able to prove “conclusively that exposure to violent video games makes more aggressive, less caring kids”.
I’m not sure about “conclusively proven” and many on slashdot have issues with the research. But there’s no point in being naive about it: experiences and activities influence our views, thoughts, and beliefs (duh). Even the US Army recognizes the value of games in developing skills (mindsets?) of future soldiers.
I’ve talked in the past about trailing ideologies – namely that we design systems to serve an era, but when the era changes, the systems often don’t. Education is a great example. In higher education and corporate training, we labour under many assumptions and ideologies that have been negated by the web, social media, and mobile technologies. Courses, classrooms, and teacher-centric learning can (should) be rethought to capitalize on what technology enables and renders obsolete from the previous model.
Who needs a prof?:
So what role is left for the teacher? To be effective, Wieman says, they must be “cognitive coaches” rather than conduits of information. Rankin believes that the change in pedagogy will happen soon. “It’s comparable to the introduction of a light switch,” he adds. “It’s just going to take a while for people to figure out what this looks like and how it works.”
Chatroulette is drawing attention from many groups – parents, students, teachers, and – as commonly focused on – the fringe of society. Basically it’s you and someone else chatting via video. If you don’t like your partner, you click and advance to another random person. Whenever a tool like this arises and causes a combination of panic and intrigue, it’s important to look beyond the tool and see the behaviours and interests of individuals. Why are people interested in meeting random people (while wearing costumes, masks, or nothing…singing songs, rapping, arguing, etc.)? What is it about chatroulette that causes many early social media adopters – as I’ve heard many state – to express disdain for the tool and a reluctance to use it? The easy answer is that we are social people who like to meet new people. Or that we are voyeuristic.
The real appeal, I think, is that we are drawn to randomness, to newness. In spite of structured content and teaching that defines formal education, we like random connections: “despite its weirdness, Chatroulette brings back an element of fun and surprise to vastness of the Internet, where social networks of friend lists and avatars has remained the norm for years on end.” Chatroulette takes the structured, secure, controllable social networking sites we participate in…and adds bit of interestingness to it. Randomness is a great motivator for participation.