I'm only happy when it rains

I've been meaning to post something on David Warlick's post Our Schools are Leaking for ages, but I was surprised to discover he made the post almost a month ago! He talks about how children don't even think about using technology. They don't even necessarily think about it as anything special - it's just there. It has always been there. It's there, you use it, it's just there!

I don't think I'm a digital native, but I like to think I have dual citizenship. Recently I discovered how little I think about the technology I carry when I flew from Glasgow to Stornoway. When I went through the metal detector, it beeped. Oops - I had forgotten about my mobile phone. It went on the X-Ray machine, but still I beeped. Oh - my Palm PDA. The security people obviously thought I was at it, so I was taken aside and frisked. It seemed that every time they touched a pocket, I pulled out another bit of electronic gubbins. A USB memory stick, a battery for my digital camera, an mp3 player, ... I have never been so thoroughly frisked in my life! (Look up Stornoway on Google Map if you have to - it's not exactly an obvious terrorist target!) I don't fly very often and I just hadn't thought about all the stuff I had in my pockets... it's just there, I use it!

I read with interest therefore a BBC report Exams ban for mobile phone users. The report says almost 300 students were "... disqualified from exams in England last summer for malpractice involving mobile phones." The report clearly suggests that all these mobile users were up to no good and seems to only grudgingly admit that they may have "inadvertently taken handsets into the exam hall." Of course some would have been trying to cheat - students have always tried that - but I suspect there were many who just took their phones in without thinking. It is always in their pocket or bag, why should this day be any different?

As David says:

Through their mobile phones, wireless handhelds, mobile game systems, their laptops, and a simple, yet pervasive sense of a broader world that ignores time and distance, our children's attention is leaking out of our classrooms, our textbooks, and our state and national standards.

The question that looms overhead is...

Do we continue to container our children, amputating their intellectual appendages during "learning" time?

or

Do we try to integrate learning into the flow of their attentions, taking advantage of the new porous nature their lives, using their appendages to connect children to the world that we are teaching them about?

The title of the post comes from a song by Garbage. If our schools are leaking, should we ban the technology that causes the leaks or should our attitude more like the lyrics in the song?

I'm only happy when it rains
I'’m only happy when it'’s complicated
And though I know you can'’t appreciate it
I'm only happy when it rains

Garbage

Tags: eLearning |education |technology |davidwarlick

P.S. I wanted to get this out the way before turning to posts based on stuff I heard/saw at SETT. More later... probably.

Disclaimer: I didn't do it... whatever it was.

I recently added a disclaimer to my profile. (I'm sure you all noticed this momentous event.) It is a variation on the disclaimer the University asks us to put on our personal web pages. However, I wish I was brave enough to use the disclaimer that is on Michael Lach's blog. A part of it reads:

Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the Chicago Public Schools, but they should be.

The Trojan Bookmark

In my previous post I commented that the way to get more teachers using social networking tools is to keep plugging away and convert the teachers one at a time. Once a teachers is an enthusiastic blogger, it is a fairly small step to become a blogging teacher in the classroom. The trouble is that it takes time to become a confident user of any technology and unless teachers are convinced that it is worth their while, they wont even bother starting.

Anyone who has heard me talking about eLearning has undoubtedly heard me recommend Gilly Salmon and her Five Stage Model. The second stage in her model is Online Socialisation. She describes this stage as follows:

Stage two involves individual participants establishing their online identities and then finding others with whom to interact.

I usually paraphrase this as, "Give people time to play with the technology". {I knew I'd posted an earlier entry on needing time to play with technology, but I couldn't find it. I spent about 20 minutes looking through my own archives, but without any success. ...So I took the dog out for a walk and it came to me - it was the very first post I made in this blog!}

For example, this year I am making more of an effort to use Flickr with our PGDE(S) Computing teachers. We have set up a private group because I want the students to have a space where they are able to interact freely without having to worry about "outsiders" looking in. At the moment we are playing with it. We posted a photo of everyone in the class, including tutors, and then invited everyone to post comments about themselves (e.g. favourite movie, favourite website etc.) and to comment on each others comments. I've added a MarsBarWinner tag and awarded Mars Bars to the best posts and the comments. It's a good way to get to know a class that I see less than once a week and for them to get to know each other. Not everyone has joined in yet, but most have. So far it is going well and is working at a fairly lighthearted level.

Frankenstein,
originally uploaded by sjohnson.

(I have already been compared to Herman Munster!) I think we are now just about ready to move to the next stage in Gilly's model and as we progress I hope we'll be able to make some of it public. We have given them time to play. Now I hope it is only a small step for them to see the educational value and to considering how they could use it in the classroom. It's a sort of Trojan Horse approach. The hope is that they will get excited by the educational potential because they have enjoyed using the tool themselves. Is that a dishonest approach? Am I selling one thing and delivering another? I hope not. I think I've been up front about what I'm doing, but I've concentrated first on Online Socialisation and on creating passionate users.

That's why I've titled this post The Trojan Bookmark. I think the easiest social networking tool to "sell" to teachers is online bookmark tools such as Furl and del.icio.us. Everyone who has used the World Wide Web for more than a couple of hours can almost instantly see the value of an online bookmarking tool. A brief demonstration of tags and categories and teachers have no problem about getting excited as to how they could be used in the classroom. So can social bookmark tools be used as a Trojan Horse to get teachers into other social tools such as wikis and podcasts and blogs (oh my)? {OK, even I'm getting fed up with that "joke" now, but somehow I can stop myself.} My answer is yes - social bookmark tools give a very easy way in.

When I created my Guide to del.icio.us I based it on Jim Wenzloff's Guide to Furl and I almost omitted his section on RSS and Bloglines. Now, I'm really glad I didn't because there, built into the guide, is a Trojan Horse. Teachers get social bookmarking almost straightaway and in the process of following the guide to create one, they also create a Bloglines account. Once they have a Bloglines account, can they be encouraged to start reading blogs? Once they start reading blogs, can they be encouraged to start writing blogs? Once they start writing blogs, will they start using them in the classroom?

I realise that what I need to do is to go back to my guide and expand the Bloglines section so that people following the guide will also subscribe to a couple of educational blogs. Perhaps I need to write a companion guide for Bloglines. (Or Rojo - I've just discovered this aggregator and I'm still at the playing stage. It came to me via a recommendation from Richard MacManus so although I'm not convinced just now, I'm willing to play for a bit longer.)

So what do you think? Social Bookmarking Tools as a Trojan Horse? Will that work better than trying to convert the educational world one teacher at a time?

Tags: eLearning |education | SocialNetworkingTools | del.icio.us | blogs | Bloglines | gillysalmon

If you build it, they will come.

So here's the problem. You've got this really cool stuff(tm) that will help improve learning. You know the pupils get it, but you can't get teachers to implement it. Pop quiz hotshot. ...What do you do? What do you do?

I was planning to do a long overdue research blog entry but made the mistake of trying to catch up a bit on some of my Bloglines feeds. I found myself eavesdropping on a conversation between Ewan and John which seems to have been prompted by an EdTech Coast to Coast podcast. Ewan wanted to know, "Is there any other way of showing blog power to the masses, other than going round bit-by-bit and showing kids and teachers in classrooms?" John picks this up and says that even that doesn't work because the response is often, "cool, but where will I get the time."

The trouble is, just as the Coast to Coast chaps discuss, you can be utterly convinced about the value of something (wikis, podcasts and blogs or whatever) but unless the teachers you are talking to get passionate about it, you'll get the reaction that John talked about. As the great Stan Laurel said:

"You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead."

{It works better if you say it out loud.}

Beckett on the mound,
originally uploaded by Pichichi.

The title of this post comes from the film Field of Dreams. In the film, a character builds a baseball park in the middle of nowhere confident that once it is built someone will come and play on it. The trouble is that all too often we build the virtual eLearning playground only to find that it ends up virtually empty!

However, I think that part of the answer is to keep plugging away at it "bit-by-bit". Only once a teacher is convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs will that teacher seriously consider classroom blogging. Make the teacher an enthusiastic blogger and you're pretty much there. One of the speakers in the podcast describes this process. He got teachers using the technology and describes how an enthusiastic Music teacher came to him and said, "If we can do this, can we do that?" The classroom uses took off as the teachers got enthusiastic.

It's not all bad though Ewan. I used to be a sums teacher, and I do remember a bit about exponential growth. If the three of us manage to get three teachers each to be enthusiastic blog readers and writers then that means there are now twelve of us. If that twelve now manage to convince another three each, that takes us to forty-eight. And if that forty... you get the picture. Think small, but aim big.

Finally, to pick up on some specifics from Ewan and John's posts and comments. It's very flattering of Ewan to describe me as carrying out "one man effort" to promote social networking tools but that sounds grander than I think it deserves. {Still not happy with "social networking tools" as a name, but I prefer it to Web 2.0 or read/write web. I'm still open to suggestions.} I'm particularly pleased the way a Flickr thing is going this year. It's all in a private group at the moment, but I may be able to make some of it public later. John's comments about the need for more networked computers chimes nicely with Steve's comments on Would you want a computer without the Internet?

Ewan asks about a "child-safe environment for blogging". I suspect you know about this already, but David Warlick's Blog Meister looks interesting from that point of view, although a totally teacher moderated blog would be a real pain for the teacher, but may not bring significant gain.

And finally, on Ewan's comment on John's blog. He says, "The FE and HE groups have more time to run blogs, and treat them as interesting from a research angle, which therefore makes them legit conerns in their day-to-day work." All I can say as lecturer in HE is that the other man's blogsphere is always greener!

Tags: education | ewanmcintosh | johnjohnston | distributed conversations | blogs | davidwarlick

Radio, Radio: Social networking Tools

RCA Future,
originally uploaded by Victory of the People.

So you had better do as you are told
You better listen to the radio

Radio Radio: Elvis Costello

I was talking to a group of teachers on Tuesday about eLearning. This is a topic I have been leading session on for some time now and over the months I've adapted and developed what I talk about. Recently I've been talking more and more about tools such as wikis and podcasts and blogs (oh my!). {As an aside, what is the collective noun for these things? My guess in the title of this blog entry is "social networking tools", but that doesn't feel quite right.}

Anyway, for once, I got the timing better than usual and had some time to do more than just say, "Get a blog!" and gave people a quick look at some wikis and podcasts and blogs (Oh, my!). {Sorry, I know that wasn't funny the first time, but I couldn't resist doing it again.} I finished by showing them Last.fm. Now I admit that this doesn't have an obvious educational application, and that since it is still in beta it is a bit flaky, but I really like the idea behind the way it works. Essentially what you do is you tell Last.fm what bands you like and it starts playing you music. You can say whether or not you like what it is playing and it will further refine the music it plays based on your choices and what music people who like the same as you like. It doesn't take long for it to create for you a personalised radio station... and a network of people who share similar music tastes. Brilliant! The only downside is that since the most recent redesign, I can no longer access it from behind the firewall at work. Scunner!

Inevitably, given that this was the example that was supposed to be a bit of a light-hearted throw-away at the end, this was the tool that seemed to provoke the most interest. I showed them my personal Last.fm page which not surprisingly revealed how much I listen to Rush. Out of a group of 12 or so teachers, one was from Toronto (the band's home city) and grudgingly admitted to liking Tom Sawyer, one teacher said she saw them years ago at the Glasgow Apollo (I was almost certainly there too) and another had been at the recent concert at the SECC in Glasgow (and her husband got a t-shirt from Geddy's tumble dryer - I think I hate him! I was miles from the stage and could barely see Geddy and so had no hope of getting a t-shirt). What are the chances of that? A quarter of the people in the room being Rush fans when I suspect most people have never even heard of them. Weird!

So, can anyone come up with an educationally sound use of Last.fm that I could use to justify showing it to teachers in the future? I'd like to see if that was a one off fluke or if the world is full of closet Rush fans.

On a vaguely related note, Daughter Number 2, via her Chemistry teacher, came up with a music link that could be of use in the classroom. I'm not sure about the copyright implications (although I suspect it's suspect) but it is well worth checking out Mike's animation of Tom Lehrer's The Elements song. Enjoy!

Tags: education | eLearning | LastFM | music

Spam!

In a strange way, I am impressed. Within a few minutes of making the previous post I had two Spam comments!

I've turned on the word verification thing for comments. I hope it helps. :-)

All I do to you is talk talk

| Lo que llevo en mi bolso - 6 |,
originally uploaded by arquera.

I have tried to keep up with blog reading, but poor time management has meant that I haven't got around to writing anything for a while.

One of the topics that caught my eye in my hurried snatches of blog reading made me think about what I'm doing wrong in this blog. I don't think I've really not got the hang of this blogging lark. I think I rant too much and listen too little. The topic that brought this home to me was a series of blog entries about distributed conversations. David Warlick seems to have kicked it off and it was then picked up by Will, Alan and Ewan (among others). I'm still reading and digesting all of this (I am a bear of very little brain) but one of the messages I have picked up is that I need to listen and respond to conversations more and rant less.

I can't promise a rant free zone, but I'll try to show that I'm listening!

Tags: education | davidwarlick | alanlevine | willrichardson | ewanmcintosh | collaborative learning | distributed conversations | blogs