Crossing the finishing line

[caption id="attachment_283" align="alignright" width="434"] Too good to be true?[/caption]

"Guys! You're the BEST band I've discovered this year!"

Last week, I received this email which momentarily got my heart beating faster. You see, when I lived in Zambia, some friends and I played music together. We recorded a performance at someone’s party and, in the spirit of the times, I put one of the songs (“See the world as the camels do”) up on social media. On myspace. Well, it was 2004; there was no Twitter and Facebook was still confined to Harvard.

‘Stardom beckons!’, I inform our drummer, Antos. But of course, fame and fortune is not the end of this story. I wasn’t taken in; I’m pretty sure if you did grab the bait, you’d soon get to pay Caroline some money to be promoted on her website. If Caroline even exists.

Between CoETaIL and my involvement in our school’s committee, I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about social media. How, once you post something, it sticks around and could come back to haunt you. How there are people out there who will prey on your unsuspecting nature. How it can add spice to life.

In other words, to get the most out of social media, you need to be smart about it. Our school has kept it mostly at arm’s length, but we are aware that we must take more seriously our role of educating all of the community about its relationship with social media.

So, when I was invited to join, I asked if I might use the social media committee’s journey as my final CoETaIL project. The learners would be the members of the committee (teachers, students and school leaders).





The project appealed to me because the learning goal is authentic: we actually do need the policy. Our success would be a real-world achievement. SPOILER ALERT: we haven’t got there yet.

One of the features of a goal which is not pre-determined is that you don’t know exactly what it will take to achieve it. Our six week project was not sufficient to ‘achieve a school-wide social media policy’, nor ‘a review process for the guidelines’. So we missed goals #1 and #4, but I believe that we are doing quite well on the other two goals.



But don’t just take my word for it. As you will see in the video, several members of our thoughtful and diligent committee communicated their thoughts. That has allowed me to look at what they may have learned.

On the principle of ‘show don’t tell’ I decided my story could be related without a voiceover. This seems to be in line with the idea of simplicity encapsulated in Presentation Zen. Moreover, as the media are all my own, I haven’t availed myself of Creative Commons. Belatedly, I have made a CC licence for the music:

Attention Deficit by DJ Gearbox is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://soundcloud.com/dj-gearb/sets/attention-deficit.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/8fa1kLQroLo[/youtube]

If you can't see the video, you may have to click in the address bar.

WHAT HAS THE COMMITTEE DONE SO FAR?

“... a foundational understanding of what [the school] could do ... a wide range of people involved... including students, which is fantastic. We brainstormed in a variety of ways to eventually come up with our unique model for social media guidelines” David

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE THE COMMITTEE TO ACHIEVE?

“A document we can work with as a school community ... find a way, once we have the document, to promote it, educate...” Katy

“If it’s not shared by the community, then what is it worth?” Lauren

“... you want a policy that allows you to continue to use social media and doesn’t scare people away from using it.” Gemma

There was no pre-testing of understanding, only afterwards, so I can’t know that their insights resulted from the activities we did. But I do have access to other evidence of learning: my own. I have been, in fact, an action-researcher, both participating and reporting.

It has been a very interesting experience, most notably because the course that we have steered has been determined, meeting by meeting, by the outcome of the previous one. We came up with some excellent ideas, such as relating social media guidelines to the DQ digital intelligences model. Most recently, however, with our eye on the available time, we have resolved to break down our goals into more manageable pieces. Thus, we are now responding to the most pressing need for, as one teacher plaintively informed a committee member,

“a piece of paper in my classroom that just tells me what to do”

In our discussions, we have cast our net much wider, which has provided many interesting ideas, but now we know what we must do in the short term. At our next meeting, which will be the final one of this round, we will consolidate the ideas and form of the requested practical ‘piece of paper’ and the process to implement it.

I have learned that I should have given the committee a clearer remit from the start, but I did not appreciate early on that we would have to limit our scope to produce promptly something tangible. I have also learned that our intensive 30 minute meetings, based around Thinking Routines, are an effective way to make progress, but I know that any repeated format suffers eventually from diminishing returns, so I think we should soon pause and consider a variety of ways we could go about our work.

I hope people who want to know what we did will watch the film and leave a comment.

So, of course, I am not going to get famous. But far from being dismayed by someone using my many-years-old relics on MySpace in a blatant attempt to exploit my ambition, I celebrate how social media allow us to preserve and propagate our creations. I believe, with common sense and education, we can learn to use them to our great benefit.

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)

• 
  

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

  
  


• 
  

  "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.

Will you take the #CoETaIL challenge?

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="549"] gratifyingly un-sexist nuclear families[/caption]

One of my most inventive colleagues teaches French by placing his students, whenever possible, in authentic language situations. When they need to learn employment vocabulary, the students each film an interview with an adult about their work and then subtitle it. I help in class with the captioning process. Last year, I enjoyed learning about the spirits distiller Madame Wagner; Herr Klensch the personal trainer and Monsieur Bettel. He's the Prime Minister of Luxembourg. Two enterprising students had secured an exclusive with our nation's CEO. I love working in small countries!

"(Technology) tools can provide students and teachers with learning that is relevant and assessment that is authentic" What is successful technology integration? on Edutopia

One great reason to accept the CoETaIL Challenge is to learn about new ways for us and our students to learn.

It is very appealing to assess our students in authentic situations, but like so much that is desirable, easier said than done. If you've worked in this way, you'll know that authentic assessment tasks are an inefficient way to achieve the traditionally narrow goals of teaching. The vocabulary of work could be imparted to these students using flash-cards and a written test. All done in 45 minutes and the syllabus bullet-point is checked off.

Instead, the task I am describing took several lessons, and homework, as well as the close attention in the classroom of my colleague, Guillaume, and me, as ed-tech coach. If you have done something similar with students, you will know, also, that movie formats, missing cables, bad sound, lost files and editing challenges are some of the obstacles on the road to success. So, though 'authentic tasks' sounds appealing, why are we taking the time and making all the extra effort, exactly? Is it worth it?

You need to decide for yourself.

Guillaume's students learned the vocabulary by formulating questions, understanding the answers and transcribing the videos; they managed their time and resources in a complex project; they practised social skills with their partner and the interviewee; they used a range of technology creatively. They ran into problems; we fixed the problems; they worked hard. The lesson in which the class all watched each other's videos was a celebration of their achievements of which the students were clearly proud. The teachers were satisfied too.

It is inescapable that the process of authentic assessment is demanding, messy and sometimes even discouraging, but there are rewards for those who stay the distance. Are you ready for the challenge?

Catalysts for understanding

If you watched the video, you now know that the Earth spins because it formed from rotating dust and nothing has stopped it so it just keeps on going. It's got nothing to do with forces, centrifugal or otherwise, nor does gravity make the Earth spin. Many former students of Physics can spout Newton's First Law of Motion, but Derek Muller's videos go beyond mere repetition of knowledge and, by first focusing on misconceptions, achieve greater understanding.

"The idea of understanding is surely distinct from the idea of knowing something." Wiggins and McTighe, Understanding by Design 2nd edition (p36)

More than just a manager

In 2018, all of the teachers in our school will be using a new learning management system (LMS). My ed-tech coach colleague and I have a full year in which to help our Upper School faculty, alongside their existing workloads, to become comfortable with the system. As a first step, we have envisaged a pilot of volunteers which will begin in August 2017. My hope for this LMS, with its myriad capabilities, is that it will not simply manage the learning, but that it will be a catalyst for change. More than simply acquiring new routines, we will explore the potential of the LMS for improving our students' learning.

We call it One to World

For nearly one year now, all of our students have brought a laptop to school every day. The learning curve has been steep, since most teachers and students had never worked in a 1 to 1 environment before. But the education has not changed very much, if at all. This is not to say that the computers are unused, rather that there isn't a strong culture of innovation. Don't get me wrong: no-one is suffering. As ever, Good Teachers + Good Students = Learning. Having gone down the road of computer-enabled learning, however, I think we should be better exploring technology's possibilities.

What should our teachers be able to do?

"The challenge is to focus first on the desired learnings from which appropriate teaching will logically follow." (p14)

The teachers will learn how to use the LMS and will know what the school wants them to do with it. Is that all? Surely there must also be understanding of how the system can support learning.

"To understand is to have done it in the right way, often reflected in being able to explain why a particular skill, approach, or body of knowledge is or is not appropriate in a particular situation" (p39).

Our teachers are not short on professional knowledge nor understanding; but many aren't familiar enough with how educational technology could help their students learn better. Our goal will therefore be to relate the mechanical processes of the new LMS to powerful educational concepts; in particular, concepts which can be enhanced by computers in the classroom.

And what might these concepts be?

[caption id="attachment_69" align="alignleft" width="300"] Image: Craig Badura[/caption]

George Couros has provided an excellent schema for how today's classroom could look. Crucially, although few of the ideas have a direct line to technology, they all can be enhanced by it.

When the Physics class used a wiki to comment constructively on each other's Energy projects; when my IB ToK students could submit any 'creative digital document' to demonstrate their understanding of Cultures; when Grade 6 students could see their Online Habits survey responses accumulate in real-time; on all of these occasions, I revelled in examples of Couros' ideas made concrete by technology.

A greater success, however, would be if they can use that knowledge gained in one situation and apply it to others.

"Understanding is about transfer... we can create new knowledge and arrive at further understandings if we have learned with understanding some key ideas and strategies" (p40)

How will we know what the teachers have learned?

What will be the evidence of learning? I'm not sure I know yet. The LMS has been purchased, but I haven't got my hands dirty with it so far. This one has a great reputation in schools. I do know that I want to use Couros' 'Today's Classroom' as part of the teachers' learning experience. There will be evidence of their Voice as they Reflect on the outcomes of their Self Assessment. I hope there will be evidence they have Thought Critically about the Problems they might solve and evidence they Chose to Innovate and to Connect with other learners.

What will be their learning experiences?

In UBD, this is the third and final stage of deciding, and since my knowledge of the evidence is incomplete due to inexperience with this LMS, I shall be developing the activities, with my coach colleague, at the start of the next school year.

On my CoETaIL projects page, I have embedded the UBD template. Being live, it will reflect the project at whichever time you read it. As I write, only the Desired Results are known, including:

Understand how new ideas (eg Couros’ ‘today’s classroom’) can be supported by the new LMS

More than knowledge, understanding will be my main criterion of success. The teaching will aim at understanding and I shall seek ways to gather evidence of:

"conceptions: that is, meanings that are general ... Without this conceptualizing, nothing is gained that can be carried over to the better understanding of new experiences" John Dewey, How we Think, 1933, p153

Paradigm Shift by the Dashboard Light (CoETaIL blog tour)

"We've got this new concept, the idea of cloud storage... it's become much more of an unremarkable thing nowadays for musicians to collaborate and be able to share their entire projects with each other across the globe." Todd Rundgren on All Songs Considered podcast.

Rundgren, who produced Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell album among many others, has been at the forefront of music technology for 50 years. From his studio in Hawaii, he uses Dropbox to work with artists anywhere in the world.

It's good to be reminded how far we have come.

CoETaIL course 2 aims to give us "the experience of a globally collaborative project". From Luxembourg, I linked up with two other colleagues working in Europe: Stephen in Milan and Valerie in Zurich. Every few days for two weeks, we met online and planned guidelines for using social media in international schools. The tools we worked with have become very familiar: Skype; Google Docs; email; phone, tablet and laptop. While sitting in our own homes, amongst our families, we worked face-to face, simultaneously on the same documents; then we made agreements and commented asynchronously, at times which suited each of us, on the others' plans. Social Media are Changing who we are is my blogpost about our project (and about my screen-free vacation that it inspired).

When, by chance, we all attended the same international conference last month, I felt I was greeting longtime friends.

It's easy to overlook how incredible this project would have seemed to teachers a generation ago. Such a collaboration could have been achieved only with plane tickets; high phone bills; envelopes and stamps.

And now, these tools are in our hands; in our pockets; in our homes; 24/7, if we allow them. Our project "Guidelines for Using Social Media in Schools" addresses the concerns we all should have about ubiquitous digital tools. Equally, it employed those same tools to blend our own ideas and experiences with the opinions of experts. Driven by our participation in CoETaIL, we experienced, as educators, what we desire for our students: the modern miracle of global collaboration.

Social Learning - it's what the Internet is for (CoETaIL blog tour)

“Is this the latest version of Windows movie maker?” Freddie asks me in class. “What is the population of Luxembourg?” Marie wants to know. “TWIF” I tell each of them. They know what I mean; they’ve heard it before.

[caption id="attachment_226" align="aligncenter" width="300"] made on festisite.com[/caption]

In answer to questions like these, others say sarcastically: “Just let me Google that for you“. The point is that the reliable and accurate answers to these questions are available to anyone in almost an instant. We no longer have to ask the teacher. TWIF stands for: That’s What the Internet is For. Just twif it, I tell the kids. And they get it.

New technology has changed our relationship with knowledge itself. Our students have access to every resource. No wonder some argue that teachers will become redundant. And yet…

…every school I have worked in looks quite like the one I went to during the industrial revolution (well, Leeds in the 1970s). Grades, tests, insular subjects, content-focused teachers. Of course, there are pockets of creativity, but they don’t add up to a bag of innovation. It’s really difficult to change things; even difficult to imagine what it would look like if they were changed on a grand scale.

There is always more than one way of looking at things.

You might sign up for CoETaIL because you’re interested in the challenges of education and change. From the start, you are immersed in many of the best ideas about teaching and learning. You join a community which is speaking the same language and asking similar questions. But you will not come away with simple answers.

In course 1, we jump right in and investigate models of educational technology. Personally, I believe that SAMR is a useful model, but it is frequently misappropriated. My PLN suggested one I prefer which I wrote about on my CoETaIL blog (Way of the SAMR eye). Making a case is an excellent way to rehearse your understanding. And the comments from the colleagues you are learning with will make you think again: they don’t necessarily agree with you.

If the education we want for our children is critical, creative and collaborative, then our learning must be like that too. Most questions aren’t googleable; instead, they lead to deeper thought and open up possibilities rather than closing them down. Most solutions are improved by the clash and compromise of difficult conversations.

CoETaIL walks this talk. You can question assumptions, express doubts, try out some new ideas, not alone but with fellow learners. If we believe our students should learn socially, then we must too.

What the 1 to 1 classroom has taught me

"Despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good." (Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014)

This grandiose conclusion was drawn when the authors tested groups of students taking notes either on laptops or longhand. "Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who took notes with their laptops." (Professor Cindy May, Scientific American).

At least two important questions went unaddressed:

1. Were the subjects in the experiment equally experienced in paper and electronic note-taking? If not, maybe you are actually measuring their aptitude with the medium.


2. What do you mean by 'classrooms'? In the experiments, only podium lecturing was tested (recorded TED talks and verbatim reading of scripts). That's not what the classrooms look like in the schools I know.

What have I learned from 1-to-1?

In nearly all of the lessons I have taught since 2008, the students have used devices for nearly all of the time. Before then, not at all. I changed abruptly because my school did and I was interested to see how far I could take the new model.

You may be an interesting teacher, but you can't compete with the Internet

One sees the truth of this even in staff meetings if teachers have their device lids up. They are not paying proper attention because your brain can't process two information streams at once. In lessons, it's the same. When I talk to my students, I insist they should not be looking at their screens. A strategy which works for me has been to organise my class as an 'inverted horseshoe' with desks around the edge of the room, laptops facing outwards. This means that when I talk to the group, I can ask the students to face me and turn their backs on their screens.

And then I shut up so that they can get on with it. Ergonomically it's an advantage too. When the students are all working, I can stand in the middle of the room and get to anyone quickly. Not every colleague has been convinced, but it works for me.

You are already an expert

I had been teaching Physics for several years before I landed in a 1-to-1 classroom. The internet had become a cornucopia of excellent teaching materials. There were assessments, simulations and videos; there were resources produced by great teachers, inspired students and world-renowned physicists. I started a wiki and embedded, linked and organised all of the assets I had found, but after I had planned my courses there were many I hadn't used even though I knew they would be great for the students. I took a step back from my role as gatekeeper. I flung back the gate. No! I took it off its hinges. In their own time, the students who wanted to know more browsed the wiki and found materials which suited their learning style and because it was online, the site also welcomed up to 5 000 visitors per day.

1-to-1 intimidates many teachers because they assume that students are more comfortable with devices than adults. This may be true, but it's not important. A teacher is an expert explainer; he is knowledgeable about his subject; he knows good teaching ideas when he sees them. A good teacher who doesn't use technology (yet) is still a good teacher. Technology is just another tool he should use to become the best teacher he can be.

Let go

So technology enabled me to improve what I was giving to my students. It also freed me to interact with them in my version of the flipped classroom. Some of the instruction was flipped to the home, but more importantly, it was flipped to the virtual classroom I had made. As the students learned from my curated resources, I could spend time with those who needed support.

To do this, I had to trust in the students' wish to learn. I wasn't standing at the front commanding their constant attention. What they were doing instead is still called note-taking, but it only vaguely resembles the activity which Scientific American said laptops don't do well. Alongside their text, students dragged in images and graphs straight from the wiki. They added photos of my sketches on the whiteboard; links to my curated videos; their own found resources (which we could then add to the wiki).

open up the kitchen and the larder, not just the dining room

The traditional classroom is like a restaurant. The visitors consume what the chef produces because she has the knowledge and expertise. But what if the clientele were allowed to choose ingredients from the shelves and then prepared their own meals under the tutelage of the chef? Of course it's inconceivable; the result might be nourishing, but is unlikely to be sophisticated. This, however, is what we have done to the classroom when we gave the students access to the same resources the teachers have (but not the expertise). The metaphor sounds outrageous, which shows what a radical change education has seen.

Of course, if all we do is try to use devices to replicate the activities which were developed for paper, we will, like Professor May, be disappointed by them.

Never mind the bubbles - a future fable

Graduating Class of 2035! My name is Indira Xi. I was born, like most of you, in 2017.

This was around the time that many of our teachers themselves graduated from school. We have heard their stories of 1-to-1 classrooms; mobile devices; MOOCs and learning journeys. Looking back, it is obvious that our forebears came up with some great ideas for education, but they didn't find a way to scale them up in practice (the average completion rate of MOOCs was 15%, and for the larger enrollments, it was typically much lower). Of course, we now know how to get it up to 100%!

Back in 2017, the big technology companies (their vampiric acronym was FANG) were dabbling with algorithms, serving up content which matched the interests of their users, and they had begun to accumulate information covering many aspects of people's lives (by studying location data, they knew who 90% of all adults were spending the night with). In those years, however, they didn't yet realise what power they had!

By 2022, five years later, everything was different! The FANG engineers had introduced recursively self-improving algorithms which very quickly sharpened the personalisation of everyone's Internet experience (it took milliseconds). When the optimum content was not available, the programs set about manufacturing and distributing stories (so much more efficient than waiting for your friends to recommend the very best videos and articles). They made digitally-generated movies which varied the cast and storyline depending on the preferences of whoever was watching. The FANGS did not survive this revolution as separate entities; they united into one huge engine called Facebubble.

Then, as you know, self-improving algorithms were introduced into education and they immediately unified every MOOC into one enormous course representing the sum of all human knowledge (the type which can be taught online, at least). They used their knowledge of every past interaction to analyse each teaching moment and to perfect a learning path for anyone to learn anything and to enjoy it. They knew their students' needs through a combination of metadata, Facebubble clicks and information from wearables (pupil dilation, skin conductivity and heartrates).

[caption id="attachment_210" align="aligncenter" width="540"] produced with festisite[/caption]

Governments were delighted. They called the new program Epystematic: a system to organise all knowledge and to personalise for each citizen exactly what society needed them to learn. Then by tweaking people's known motivations, they made the process maximally efficient. We didn't even need public exams any more: the Epystematic already knew what we could do. Universities loved that! And once the machines started calling every election result perfectly, there was no point holding votes any more. So they didn't.

Fellow students, this is the learning world we entered.

The classroom was so personalised that no two students were learning the same thing at the same time. We put on our VR goggles and Epystematic knew us better than our own parents, friends or teachers (whose role had been reduced to handing out the equipment). There was no social contact with other children in the class; why would we need anyone else when the output from our headsets was so finely tuned to our own brains? We made no choices. And the more we used Epystematic, the better it did its job. It was personalisation, but it was not personal.

This time was called, as you will remember, The Great Sedation.

So what changed?

[caption id="attachment_209" align="alignleft" width="221"] Back in the day[/caption]

After five years, in 2027, came the punk teachers and their Personal Unfiltered Network of Knowledge. There were some in every school; the punks took on the Epystematic dinosaur. Happily, they had some excellent weapons (which had been around since 2017) to help them in their battle.

Ad Nauseam, the application which simply and silently clicks on every single ad link to make the data they are gathering about us completely useless. The punks taught their students to obfuscate their digital contrail.

Solid, the decentralised web tools, built by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which make sure that our personal information is kept in a vault so that web companies must request our permission for access when they need to consult it. The punks showed us how to take back ownership.

Wikitribune, a platform which unites journalists and volunteers to produce news stories which can be easily verified and improved.

A DIY sensibility: Inspired by the historic upheaval in music half a century earlier, the punks rejected the status quo.

The tide turned. The punks had no need of large institutions and began small independent schools which decided for themselves how they would organise their learners, like the one we are graduating from. We recognise learning as a social process; personalisation gives way to personal learning; we all have a role in deciding what and how we learn; we recognise that learning is sometimes a messy and difficult experience. And every day, our punk teachers help us negotiate that process.

[caption id="attachment_213" align="aligncenter" width="635"] produced using ransomizer.com[/caption]

With their heads no longer in the bubble of an algorithmic feed, people started thinking for themselves again and democracy returned.

Fellow students, our journey has only just begun.

Yes, technology may be your friend, but it is only people who can teach and learn!

Beware the poison butterflies

[caption id="attachment_199" align="alignleft" width="215"] The high point of my gaming life[/caption]

Last week, teaching my Middle School students some basic coding (in the land of the blind... etc), I programmed a game, at least I think that's what it is. If you get all the way through this post, you can play when you get to the end.

For their official IB internal assessment, every ToK student must make a presentation according to stringent IB requirements. The descriptor for the top grade requires students to be sophisticated and insightful while using convincing arguments, different perspectives and an analysis with significant outcomes. A tall order.

Furthermore, the basis of the presentation is a real-life situation (RLS) which suggests to the student a knowledge question (KQ). The KQ has particular qualities: open-ended; about knowledge; in ToK vocabulary.

The stakes are high because there will be no second chance and a student's final IB score and therefore her higher education could depend on it.

why all the long faces? Let's at least make it fun!

On a whim last year, I made a set of 40 vocabulary cards for each student containing IB's prescribed 8 Ways of Knowing (green cards); 8 Areas of Knowledge (red) and 24 useful words which I selected (blue). The students have become quite used to consulting these cards during lessons and we have speculated how we could use them to make ...

...A game.

Matt Baier gamified PD at his school by:

'creating a list of skills in which our faculty should be proficient. Our challenge was determining how faculty would demonstrate their knowledge.'

This is my challenge also. Here are some elements of ToK in which students should be proficient.

1. 
   

   Real-life situation

   
   


2. 
   

   Knowledge Question

   
   


3. 
   

   ToK vocabulary

   
   


4. 
   

   Other RLSs

   
   


5. 
   

   Other KQs

   
   


6. 
   

   Arguments

   
   


7. 
   

   Perspectives

   
   


8. 
   

   Analysis

   
   

- But wait, you can't gamify unless it's electronic.

- Excuse me?

- Oh yes, it's well known that only computer games count when we are talking about gamification.

- It's true that the majority of books on this topic such as Gamify your classroom by Matthew Farber devote most of their pages to the digital realm, but the writers do not specify this medium in their discussions about game theory and the importance of play.

 - Oh, OK then.

All games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation (Reality is Broken, McGonigal, p21)

So we will use the vocabulary cards as a tool to help each student to construct an initial plan for her presentation. The goal is to brainstorm a structure for their assessment. The game models I am using are the card-game Patience or the digital sandbox The Sims. I have devised simple rules and a playing surface so that they can construct a network of ideas based around the vocabulary. When this stage is completed, each student will provide suggestions on a small number of the others' plans and then return to their own plan to process the feedback they have received.

It resembles in many ways a normal brainstorm, but I am trying to harness some of the elements which make games so motivating.

Everyone is a participant... A 'need to know' challenges students to solve a problem... embrace a process of testing and iteration... share their work, skill and knowledge. (Quest to Learn School website)

I hope the activity will benefit from a feeling of community in the class as they all begin the daunting quest to deliver a sophisticated and insightful presentation. Whilst every presentation must be unique (though group members will share identical grades in the end), in the preparation stage a collective effort may contribute extra dimensions to everyone's thinking (if they are prepared to see it). The ToK presentation is a non-zero-sum game, which means that no-one gains marks at the expense of anyone else - there is no strategic benefit in being competitive.

In the 1990s, a puzzle video game called Chip's Challenge was bundled with Windows. After many late nights, I completed all 149 levels. Since you can't progress to a subsequent level unless you have finished the previous one, it gave me great respect for the motivating power of mastery. Over the years, when I have considered gamifying my lessons, it is this feature of computer games that I have focused on: a testing, rather than a teaching environment.

There is an important difference between games that teach a learner how to do something and games that test what a learner already knows (The Gamification of Learning and Instruction Fieldbook, Kapp et al, p49)

Interestingly, then, the game element, which I am now implementing, is not a test but a teaching game...

... unlike 'Beware the Poison Butterflies'

 

VLOG!

TRANSCRIPT

Social media are changing who we are

"Our body is physiologically rewarding us for talking about ourselves online" Moffit and Brown, ASAPScience video (below)

[youtube]https://youtu.be/HffWFd_6bJ0[/youtube]

It is clear from the research behind this video, that using social media not only changes what we do, but also who we biologically are. Most people in one study regularly experienced Phantom Vibration Syndrome. Being online all the time can have serious consequences. How long before smartphones get statutory health warnings?

I have been talking this week with two CoETaIL colleagues about the guidelines for using social media which our schools need but don't yet have. Our project was structured around four face-to-face skype calls over 12 days during which we evolved a process; set ourselves homework; tweaked our plans; and got to know each other. I have met Stephen briefly before in real life, but I've never met Valerie. It is appropriate that a social medium has been one of the crucial elements in our project.

"We would like to collaborate in a process to gather information and ideas to help each of our schools arrive at some guidelines for teacher and student use of social media." (Valerie, Stephen and Steve)

Our process is woven from a few strands:

1. We each conducted an investigation in our school, wishing to know how their different cultures would influence the process of drawing up social media guidelines. I received 99 responses to my survey (see right). The anonymous findings are collated in a document. We then read each other's summaries, commented and asked questions. It's not only a document but a rich conversation.


2. Early in the project we read "How to create social media guidelines for your school" (Anderson). It gave us a starting point for our fruitful discussion and suggested a possible process we have elaborated into our roadmap to social media guidelines which reflects the common understanding collaboration has led us to. We intend to present the document at each of our schools as a proposal for a way forward. It is embedded on my CoETaIL projects page.


3. Research into the solutions which other institutions, both educational and secular, have drawn up to support their individual circumstances. This included a pertinent exchange with John Mikton.


4. Frequent back and forth between us; not only the skype conversation, but also dozens of emails.

When that is all done, and this blogpost is finished, I will have completed CoETaIL Course 2. It has been a rewarding experience, not least the current collaboration with colleagues who, although we work in different countries, are nevertheless similarly faced with teachers and students in need of guidance about social media. As I concluded in a blogpost I wrote elsewhere, collaboration can be really difficult. We all bring our ideas to the table which enrich the project, but we must equally abandon some of them. The reward is a more complete product than any individual could have made. That has definitely been the case with Stephen, Valerie and me - and it was painless too.

During Course 2, I have been immersed in ideas about what perpetual connection to the Internet might mean:

• What will we do if the platforms to which we entrust so many of the stories of our lives do not live forever?


• How do we properly advise our children about social media when, if we are honest, we do not know many of the answers ourselves?


• What is the incentive to play fair about copyright when the chances of being caught are minimal?


• Is it wise of us to accept, however knowingly, the Faustian bargain of Facebook?


• What will be the long term effect of the digital contrail we are constantly leaving behind us?

These were the questions posed by my five blogposts during the course. I am certain that we do not definitively know the answer to any of them.

I greatly admire the performance artist Marina Abramović. You may have seen the film in which she sat in the MoMA in New York and met thousands of members of the public in silence, one-to-one, staring into their eyes, day after day. It's amazing to see.

She has a very clear view of the ways that we live our lives and how we can make changes which expose the assumptions we had taken to be facts. Speaking on the Note to Self podcast, she recommended:

"switch off your telephone... take a chair next to the window... and do absolutely nothing... What happens to all that energy that you have? You start thinking about the things you never have time to think about... you get into this state of peacefulness... three hours of your life" (Marina Abramović)

Is that really so extreme? I don't think so. We often spend three hours on activities a Martian would find strange. Sometimes, you can learn about the ubiquitous only when it is removed for a while.

So, following a couple of months in which I have spent a lot of productive time on CoETaIL, thinking about familiar things in new ways; learning to write regularly; making new friends, I have decided to call time on my life on the Internet. I don't know what it will be like, but my plan is to be completely off the grid for at least two weeks. I hope that, by cutting loose temporarily, I will gain an insight into what it means to be continually connected for the rest of the year.

"Christmas is supposed to be fun and you want to lash yourself on the back?" (my son on hearing my plans)

"We have to trust this gut feeling that we are completely f****d up with technology" (Marina Abramović in Huffington Post)

 

5 must-use social media for 21st century students

You clicked! Are you also tempted by list blogposts and then find the content disappointing? There is a list at the end of this post, however.

When I asked my colleague Dave's class of 13 year-olds here in Northern Europe how many of them were regular users of Twitter, I expected, if not a forest, at least a copse of arms. Three. All boys. In a class of twenty. Further interrogation revealed that only one of the three used his account actively (to keep in contact with players of a particular game). Other classes turned up the same picture. Dave and I had planned to use Twitter as a means to generate real-time conversations among the students. They dutifully cooperated, but treated it as a quaint adult preference. We persevered for a short time then looked elsewhere.

[caption id="attachment_105" align="alignright" width="467"] Subjective selection of data by SW[/caption]

My finding was confirmed in an interesting spreadsheet of bandwidth use on our school's wireless network shared by Olivier, the IT manager. I extracted a subjective selection of sites which I believe are used largely during students' leisure time and generated a graph. Top of the list are four 'consumption' sites, followed by Snapchat which leads the social networks. That's Google+ resting his lazy butt on Twitter, Pinterest and WhatsApp.

The idea of online social networks is still young. If it was born in 2003 with myspace.com, then it has only just become a teenager. Soon Facebook surged ahead and has maintained that lead as it continually evolves. Twitter joined the pack but seems to be flattening out in terms of active users. Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, PutieDami. When I told my students about the graph above, they were unsurprised that Snapchat is top of the tree at our school. I predict, though, that in three years' time, 13 year-olds will be communicating with a network we haven't even heard of yet. Who could have foreseen 10 years ago that the brevity of 140 characters would be so alluring, or that pictures that expired within 10 seconds would captivate a generation?

[caption id="attachment_108" align="alignleft" width="167"] Everyone has his own tech landscape[/caption]

Though claims of exponential change can appear exaggerated, social media platforms do seem to have followed an accelerating pattern. With growing frequency, each cohort of young people seeks its own medium which excludes not only their parents but even their older siblings. We do not know what will happen given that apparently big beasts can became evolutionary dead-ends within a few years; the social network ecosystem is savage.

There are consequences for our approach as educators. Many of us have realised that we must harness the power of the tools of the digital age, whose astronomical processing power and global reach enable billions to interact irrespective of geography. It makes the magic in wizarding fiction seem tame by comparison. But since your students may not be using the same tools as mine; since their younger peers are already looking elsewhere; since every tech start-up has the incentive to ensnare the next generation with novelty, what are the universal principles which will guide us in helping them to use the proliferating platforms beneficially?

It's all about communication. Do we comprehend each other? Do our exchanges promote respect and understanding? Are we making the world better? I'm not talking about digital social media here, but all of the ways in which groups of people can share ideas.

 

FIVE SOCIAL MEDIA ALL STUDENTS MUST MASTER

1 Language

Language is a medium for social exchange. We must teach our students to use it to convey meaning; to avoid misrepresentation and to develop new understandings between people.

2 Kindness

It is too easy to let our impulses get the better of us and to behave unkindly in the heat of the moment. We must help our students to recognise that there are myriad ways to treat others with consideration, each of which makes the world a better place.

3 Emotion

All human interactions have an emotional element. Our students must learn not to be afraid to communicate how they feel and to be able to read the emotions of others.

4 Critical Thinking

We have access to a virtually limitless ocean of information, much of which is unmediated by quality control. From an early age, young people must learn how to weigh carefully the words and images they are served.

5 Culture

The more we are exposed to different points of view and ways of living, the more we realise that what is familiar to us is merely one mode of being. Educators must help students to see that human experience is diverse and that no culture is superior to any other.

Explain it to me like I was thirteen

[caption id="attachment_99" align="alignright" width="378"] We are not amused: Licensed under Creative Commons by Carl Lender on wikimedia[/caption]

Two days ago I watched the film 'Queen Live at the Hammersmith Odeon' from 1975. It took me back to when I was 13 and discovering exciting cultural phenomena. My parents did not agree and pomp-rock was absent from the family playlist in those years. The enjoyment I experienced as a teenager has prevailed, however, despite the domestic disapproval of 40 years ago.

Thirteen year old Greg Hoffman got an iPhone 5 for Christmas in 2012 and the next day his fearful mother, Janell, issued him a contract. There are 18 points to the contract, of which half are rules such as: "It does not go to school with you". There's also some good advice: "See the world happening around you". Janell acted on one of the foremost duties of a parent: to protect her child from the dangers of the world. The iPhone "scared the hell out of me", she admitted. Her reaction was one-sided; there was no negotiation. She wrote up the contract in 20 minutes and presented Greg with a fait accompli. Five years later, it's still on her website, unchanged; you can download the contract and impose it on your own kids.

There are many times when our superior experience of the world entitles us to instruct our children. In issuing her commandments to Greg, Janell ("being bossy is fun") felt she knew what could go wrong and decided the best solution was to be authoritarian. It's an understandable motivation.

Many schools, in advising their students about how to use technology, do the same. They try to manage behaviour by proscription and disapproval. In loco parentis, they have the right, and sometimes the duty, to forbid harmful activities. But like anything else, adults are not qualified to make up rules about technology unless they first take the effort to learn about it.

In 2015 in the 'Status Update' edition of This American Life podcast (first 14 minutes of the episode), Ira Glass talks to Jane, Julia and Ella, teenage girls who spend a lot of their lives using Instagram. The conversation is not judgmental and the girls describe in fascinating detail the specific language and rituals of their culture. It is clear that they have thought intelligently about the pitfalls and benefits. This is not to say that they are not in need of advice and guidance on occasion, but the programme respectfully takes the opportunity to learn about why teenage girls use Instagram rather than condemning them from a position of ignorance.

Schools often do not give their students this degree of consideration. The adults, alarmed by the potential for misuse of mobile devices, and sometimes influenced by anecdote rather than research, devise rules which seek to ban the unpreventable. Their false assumptions are twofold. Firstly, they assume they know what the students are doing; secondly, they assume the students are unaware of the consequences. Children are more sophisticated and reflective than we often give them credit for.

The school where I work is trying to respond rationally to the use of social media. We have a 'Digital Citizen's Agreement' which applies to all members of the community. The agreement considers in general terms "Internet and devices" and addresses "abusive behaviour", but does not offer answers to the questions we have about how, if at all, we should integrate social media into school life (of course, this integration did not wait until we had a policy and has already happened organically).

What would a good 'Social Media Policy' look like? Presumably it would have to address many aspects of school: social communication by adults and students; educational uses; marketing of the school; teaching strategies. The policy might discourage or prohibit certain activities, but it would be written from a position of knowledge obtained by research. Crucially, I hope it would embrace how students and teachers actually use social media and it will also look forward to ways in which we can promote positive attitudes to life online and off. This is where we are right now, wondering where to go next.

Last week, at the ECIS Annual Conference, I met fellow Online 7 cohort member Stephen Reiach. We agreed how each of our schools is in need of a robust policy covering social media. We are now discussing how we can make the process of informing a social media policy the focus of our joint Course 2 project. Are any readers of this blog interested in joining us? If so, please leave a comment below.

Please leave a comment even if you are not wanting to work with us!

 

I finally renounce my life of crime

Many years ago while holidaying in South America, my friend and I were robbed at knifepoint. We had ignored advice and ventured into a deprived area of town. The young men who surrounded us were probably disappointed, however, when, wrenching it from my wrist, my Rolex fell apart in their hands. Sadly for them I was not a rich mark, but rather a cheapskate buyer of counterfeited goods.

[caption id="attachment_96" align="alignright" width="306"] Pirate loot[/caption]

My history as a pirate began many years earlier and I feel it is finally time to confess. Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have recorded hundreds of albums on cassette tape; I have bought bootleg LPs; ripped CDs; torrented music and movies. As I have moved to new destinations around the world, I have quickly learned where the illegal DVDs are sold and how the local authorities tolerate the trade.

Nor in my work have I been scrupulous. I have downloaded videos and music from YouTube; used photos without attribution; uploaded past exam papers to the public Web. I have done these things for what I thought was the benefit of my students. I turned a blind eye to colleagues who did the same; in fact I taught them the mantra: Everything is acceptable in the pursuit of educating young minds which is a sacred task. I didn't try to find out what the rules actually were; I assumed they were complex and inconvenient. I was confident that I wouldn't get into trouble. When a bounty hunter working for the IB got some of the exam papers taken down, I shrugged.

There may have been more (did I mention the Converse All Stars that weren’t? The boxed set of The Wire?), but that's more or less the size of it. Amen. I did it because I could, because it was easier and because I got away with it.

As we are often quick to tell our students, it's not relevant whether other people are doing something wrong too. I wasn't trying to make money, I just repeated the mantra and carried on teaching my students. I have learned over the years that, whatever they say, in many cases, people are more motivated by the fear of being caught than ethical issues.

I have, at least, always been respectful of writers and have given credit for the words I have used. But, as members of society, we shouldn't just make up rules to suit our own prejudices. Even though there are cases in life for civil disobedience, disregarding the intellectual property of other people is not one of them. The ownership of the products of one's creative labours is an important right and the fact that "in the digital world the one fact we can't escape is that every single use of culture produces a copy" (Lessig) does not mean that copyright is unimportant.

[caption id="attachment_95" align="alignleft" width="355"] Licensed under Creative Commons by Silvia Tolisano[/caption]

Surprise, surprise, it's not actually that complicated. Clever explainers like Larry Lessig and Silvia Tolisano have helped me to understand what I need to know about Creative Commons and why it is important. Lessig is a modern-day hero who has applied his creative legal mind to the new situation where culture embraces the remix. Tolisano (left) has provided a superb and useful summary of the precise recipes we can employ for almost every situation we find ourselves in. Inspired by their work, I am contrite and I shall perform three immediate actions.

In the past, my attributions have been inconsistent, but now I am going back through my writings (at least on this blog) to put things right.

Secondly, for some time I have been creating my own images to illustrate my blogs and presentations. I shall begin to use Creative Commons licenses for these artifacts to make clear the re-use I am happy to accept.

Lastly, I shall delete the pages on my old website which the "anti-piracy" man working for IBO has failed to find. It doesn't matter that the papers are old, freely available elsewhere and useful to teachers and students, nor that my goal is purely educational, the IBO has a right to keep them to itself if it wishes. We can't pick and choose.

So, why are our students bad at respecting copyright? There are various obvious reasons (such as a lack of modelling from their teachers), but we should ask ourselves: "What is their incentive to observe others' intellectual property rights?" when being 'good' is inconvenient, time consuming and, in general, there are no adverse consequences if we're bad.

My colleague, Becky and I have discussed how best to instill this important attitude in our Grade 6 students. After explaining the mechanics of Creative Commons, we have set a task for the students to make their own creative work (a personal logo). At the end of the unit, they will all obtain their own Creative Commons license for the logo, making personal decisions about attribution, sharing and derivations. We are hoping that seeing themselves as creators with rights, they will more readily appreciate the rights of others.

---

Footnote: So I have put a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License on this blog (see below) which is the most permissive, only requiring attribution. it covers everything on the blog that is mine. I'd be very interested in any comments as to whether I have made a good choice and done the right thing (for example, what is that copyright sign doing there?).

What we mean when we talk about privacy

Have you seen this video?



It demonstrates how far we have come in a short time, that these people receiving week-old news remind us of Rip van Winkle.

So we bemoan our loss of privacy. We expect Facebook to allow us to join its network for free and then complain that we don’t like the deal. It’s too late to claim sanctimoniously that “the line between our private lives and the public persona are blurring.” (unnamed author on The Rebel Yell). You don’t have to be on Facebook (no, you don’t). If (like me) you do choose to, don’t claim you weren’t aware that it is a transaction.

“Faustian bargains are by their nature tragic or self-defeating for the person who makes them, because what is surrendered is ultimately far more valuable than what is obtained, whether or not the bargainer appreciates that fact.” (Brittanica.com)

[caption id="attachment_86" align="alignleft" width="167"] SW: Site of antisocial media[/caption]


So that’s easy. Just don’t use Facebook, or refuse friend requests from everyone but the very closest. You can also fix it so that no-one but you can post anything about you on your timeline and if you have been tagged elsewhere it won’t be seen by your friends. The drawbridge to your castle is well and truly up; anything which leaves is scrutinised by vigilant guards. Thankfully, your friends are not quite so cautious about their information, otherwise Facebook would be a much more boring place than it is. You can still check out what is going on in your network including the uncurated serendipities you stumble upon:

“Oh interesting: I didn’t know those two knew each other!”

“That acquaintance is in town; I’ve always wanted to know him better.”

“My son shouldn’t be doing that at parties!”.

“Everybody lurks. Only the blithe let on.” (Elle Hunt in The Guardian)

It does seem a bit unfair, though. The world gets your controlled brand whilst you enjoy their warts and all adventures. Maybe you should refuse to read stuff about other people which you wouldn’t tell about yourself. Presidential candidate’s unguarded comments? No thanks, I wouldn’t like anyone releasing my candid chats. Private emails? Hands off, they were hacked.

When we talk about privacy, it seems, we may be more concerned about our own than other people’s. Surely it works both ways, though. In the real world, when you hide yourself away in your room, you don’t see anyone else. When’s the last time you were offline for a week? A day? Even a  waking hour? Our students may never have experienced a time in their lives when they were unreachable.

[caption id="attachment_87" align="alignright" width="300"] Image licensed under Creative Commons by Brad Higham on Flickr[/caption]

When I think back to pre-email visits to friends, I wonder how we arranged it at all. I’m not saying those days were better, just that something has occurred which has profoundly changed ...er... something. I’m not sure what it is that’s changed, though. My children do not live near to me, but we speak at least once a week and exchange messages pretty much daily. Contrastingly, when I left home, I heard new music only on the radio or from friends; read one physical daily newspaper; learned the lessons my teachers chose to teach me. I regularly communicated only with the handful of people I actually met. I was often alone and had no knowledge of what other people were doing at that time, nor was I following world events minute by minute.

Last year, I went walking across the Belgian Ardennes for seven days. I didn’t go online at all (though, pathetically, I had my phone with me “for emergencies”). On Day 5, when I thought I’d listen to a podcast, I swiftly removed my earbuds again as I found the disembodied voices disturbing in a woodland setting. Since then, although I came home with a restful feeling, I haven’t had another Internet-free day.

For the new generation, the connected environment is the only one they have known. No doubt they find our reminiscences about house phones and encyclopedias quaint. As their educators, though, we must do our best to evaluate the advantages, but also the losses. I relish the permanently online world and its expanded horizons, but wonder whether another species of experience has become endangered, if not extinct.

Sometimes the only way to know what you have is to remove it for a while. I have tried the experiment in my leisure time, but I am curious what effect it would have in a classroom if I were to ask my students and colleagues to work without any technology at all for a time. We could analyse what difference a Screen Free Week (or day?) made to the learning without attaching a value judgement.

Every experience has value and the pre-Internet situation embodied a kind of empowering ignorance (you don’t have to know everything right now, especially about your friends). Furthermore, in experiments where participants were deprived of constant stimuli, “boring activities resulted in increased creativity” (Mann and Cadman). One of our responsibilities as educators is to ensure that through exposure to a variety of experiences our students come to know how they learn and live best. We want them to see technology as an addition to their learning toolkit, not just a new normal.

[caption id="attachment_88" align="aligncenter" width="775"] Image: SW and public domain mashup[/caption]