Dear committee...

"Thank you very much for your continuing support of the Social Media Committee. We have now had 2 meetings which were very productive, I feel. At the recent meeting on Friday 27 October, we generated, sorted, connected and elaborated our conclusions from the first meeting, and as a result, we have an idea-web with which to move forward. Our ideas came from other schools' policy exemplars; our existing digital citizenship agreement (DCA); and our own reflections and research. These were sorted and connected into themes."

in search of a good thinking routine

 The weekend before our second meeting, as luck would have it, I attended a seminar given at our school by Ron Ritchhart and learned a new Thinking Routine which matched closely the goals our committee had for expressing our thoughts: Generate, Sort, Connect, Elaborate.

Our new Director of Educational Technology, John Mikton, who is responsible for the social media committee, has given me some freedom to organise the activities with him. As the pictures show, we have so far held two meetings in which students, teachers and administrators explored other school's ideas and our own unique situation. By the end of the process, we shall have met six times. The UbD planner with goals and evidence are here.

And here is a summary of the activities:

"In preparation for the third meeting, we all will reflect and research the different types of phrasing in the Policy exemplars from other schools in this folder or in any other examples we find. This will help us to establish the tone and style of the policy we will develop."

We are building up a collection of policies from a variety of schools and other institutions here at Diigo.

"Also, in preparation for the third meeting, a Draft Team sub-committee will meet to review the themes emerging from the idea-web. This team will propose to the full committee a framework for the draft policy which we will discuss on 14 November."

In the UbD template, I have summarised what I would like the participants to have learned by the end of the process.

Explain	the important features of a social media policy
Interpret	everyday behaviours with social media in terms of benefits or concerns
Apply	experiences of personal social media use to recommendations for the community
Perspective	of which behaviours with social media are positive for the school community and which are not
Empathize	with those who struggle with social media (through ignorance, misuse, overuse etc)
Self-knowledge	of personal strategies which emphasise the benefits and minimise the harmful effects of social media use

"As I said in the meeting, I would be interested to meet each committee member to record a short audio or video interview about your learning experience in the committee. I'd like to meet you in your place of work if possible. Please let me know if you have an appropriate moment for this discussion (10 minutes)."

Here are the questions I shall use to establish how the members of the committee have come to understand the process of implementing a social media roadmap.

"Thank you for your support. We have made a lot of progress and benefited very much so far from your variety of knowledge and perspectives. I'm looking forward to achieving our goal together in the coming meetings."

The roadmap is not the road

[caption id="attachment_251" align="alignleft" width="168"] Further on up the road[/caption]

"At the end of nine or ten nights he realized, with a certain bitterness, that he could expect nothing from those students who accepted his teaching passively, but he could of those who sometimes risked a reasonable contradiction." (JL Borges in Labyrinths)

My students are working on their most important project in the IB Theory of Knowledge course - the final externally assessed essay. They must choose one title from six, such as #6 below.

The titles beg some questions (what could 'robust' mean in this context?). I tell them to try to explain their ideas to friends or family and if they can't make themselves clear, it's probably because they haven't properly got their head around it yet.

I had the same experience, of failing to communicate my ideas, when telling my colleagues what I was going to do for my Course 5 project for CoETaIL.

It took a little while for me to realise it, but their incomprehension is explained by the fact that I had not myself figured it out properly. As this post sets out, I was hoping to use our school's pilot project for the new LMS as a medium to apply my CoETaIL learnings. In practice though, as we implement the program, there are too many unknowns in the early stages. Initially, the teachers will be dealing with practical considerations and these don't lend themselves to my plan to apply, before Christmas, George Couros' ideas for Today's Classroom. Thankfully, another idea was waiting in the wings.

 

[caption id="attachment_249" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Imagine, aged 17, having to answer this question in 1500 words![/caption]

 

During Course 2, my collaborative project with Stephen in Milan and Valerie in Zurich was to plan a roadmap towards implementing social media guidelines in our respective schools. At the time, the eventual implementation was hypothetical, but the school where I work is now feeling a pressing need for guidelines for using social media. A committee has been formed and I have some freedom to influence how it goes about its work. This is not an orthodox teaching project, but I have found that I can fit it easily into the UbD template if I assume that the travellers along the road are on a learning journey. Instead of lessons, we shall have meetings; we will demonstrate that we have learned about social media within our community by proposing guidelines and inviting feedback; ultimately, our achievement will be assessed by its acceptance (or otherwise) by the school management.



This brings me back to "robust knowledge". In the context of the quotation, I think it is knowledge which is not easily gainsaid. The title is suggesting that in order for a community to know something, the knowledge must be tested to ensure it is robust. There will be areas on which the group has consensus and these can form a basis; but without the challenge of a disagreement, the knowledge will not be required to defend itself against criticism. I'm sorry, that's the convoluted way we are expected to talk in ToK, as if knowledge were a commodity and we agree what it is.

The challenge for the committee, therefore, is to make sure that it tests its proposals for using social media at school. There is a strong human tendency to seek consensus and to avoid disagreement because it feels like conflict. We must make sure that we do not fall into that pothole. The approach we have planned for the first committee meeting next Tuesday is to ask participants (who are students, teachers and managers) to use techniques which generate a multiplicity of ideas (more than we need) so that to formulate the guidelines, we must decide which ideas are the best ones. Between the meetings, we shall continue to research, curate and debate.

The project rubric applied

We shall communicate our guidelines with Visual Literacy strategies appropriate to the different constituencies of our community. (My Course 3 post: A Great and Vibrant Language)

By gratefully acknowledging the sources of our inspiration (at least five will be considered in the first meeting), Copyright will be respected. (C2: I Finally Renounce my Life of Crime)

The project is fulfilling an Authentic need and its Assessment will be whether it is fit for its purpose.

I have long been inspired by the ISTE Technology Standards. In this case, the Citizen category for students and educators are particularly relevant (C1: Taxonomy Domine)

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  "Educators inspire students to positively contribute to and responsibly participate in the digital world." (ISTE, 2017)

  
  


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  "Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical." (ISTE, 2016)

  
  

Although this will be a committee meeting, we shall need skills of Classroom Management.

The committee will be put in Active Learning situations in which members generate their own ideas and reflect on their experiences of social media.

It is important that the Use of Technology is not gratuitous. Most of the activities in our committee will encourage face-to-face communication; the dialogue and curation, which will continue between meetings, will be facilitated by technology. (C4: What the 1 to 1 classroom has taught me)

We shall be successful if robust guidelines emerge from our consensus and our disagreements.