Back to Edtech Basics #2 – Communication

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Edtech basic #1 was access to information from a variety of perspectives around the world in a variety of forms. Edtech basic #2 is again about access, but this time it is about access to people.

I remember the first time my class emailed some one else to ask a question. I was teaching grade four in 1998 and my class had taken a walk in our community to talk about architecture and building design. On our walk, the kids wanted to know why most homes had peaked roofs, but most large commercial buildings had a flat roof. When we returned to the classroom I had the kids locate an architecture firm that had their contacts listed online. It turned out they were located in Chicago. We put together an email as a class with our question and sent it off into cyberspace. The next day we had a response that explained the idea behind these flat roofs. We were all amazed by how easy it was and what we had learned.

Since then we’ve worked with classrooms around the world. We started blogging years ago when few others were. We’ve made contact with people on every continent except for Antarctica. We’ve blogged with others. We’ve skyped with others. We’ve completed video, audio and photography projects with other classes. We’ve taken part in large scale events and talked to single people to learn about the experience of their family during the times of the Nazis and Kristallnacht. We’ve talked to authors and experts of all kinds. Most importantly for my class and myself we’ve been fortunate enough to establish a few long term relationships with other teachers and classrooms. (Unfortunately, these days we’ve lost that connection and I miss it.)

Understanding that communication is an edtech basic allows you to open your classroom to others around the world and admit that their are valuable people with knowledge who can contribute to the learning of your students.

Unfortunately, many districts and divisions stand in the way of communication, seeing the software and websites that allow these contacts to take place as dangerous. Basic tools like blogs, wikis, Skype and Google hangouts are regularly filtered. There are many issues inside the basic of communication that need to be solved on a school or district basis.

Communication as an edtech basic lets us see the world as our classroom. Filtering those connections pushes our classrooms and our kids into a smaller world that is only populated by people nearby. It encloses them in a world where the “outside” is seen as dangerous. It encloses them in a space where they have few opportunities to interact with people from a variety of cultures and with a variety of experiences and values. In our globalized world and multicultural societies the edtech basic of communication is a valuable tool to combat racism and prejudice.

““Stranger danger” panic is the best gift America ever gave to Facebook.”

(quote taken from this article at Wired)

Fight filtering policies. Make connections. See others as having valuable perspectives, information and understandings to share in the education of your students.

“Blogs are the Vinyl Records of the Internet”

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I thought this was a great quote. It also helps me to put into perspective some of my beliefs about learning, about information, and about changes happening online.

The quote comes from a full article in the Washington Post about the decline of blogging in Iran. A few years ago, Iran emerged as a culture filled with high traffic, powerful blogs. It was called Blogestan. But, these days, as in many other cultures around the world, personal blogging is retreating in favour of corporate social media sites such as Facebook, twitter, and tumblr.

While the article’s stats are specifically about Iran, much of the information rings true no matter where you might live:

“While in the earlier period 68.2 percent of respondents said that they went directly to blogs, now only 30.6 percent do, and 47.3 percent said that they instead access blogs through social media. Social networking sites have become the primary location for comments and discussion.”

and

“The rise in SNS (social networking sites) has not only significantly affected how and what types of blog content are produced and promoted, but it has also fundamentally altered the nature of the blogger to audience relationships. Over time, most bloggers migrated to SNS to promote their blogs and reach their audience.”

Most people who write a long form blog probably have a similar experience. For example, every single day, twitter drives the most traffic of any site to this blog. I believe that the change from blogging towards the growth of social media sites also speaks to a difference between the want / need for an audience compared to the care and feeding of a community, but that is a post for another time.

I am returning to blogging after a few months away and trying to rediscover my voice and my space in the edutech-o-sphere. There is no doubt that edtech voices are changing. Fewer blogs. More twitter accounts. Fewer communities. More corporations and money. Less open source and more off the rack turnkey solutions. Our community continues to evolve and the results of that on teachers, on teaching, on students and on all our learning isn’t clear. It’s not clear yet who is going to derive most of the benefit from these changes. I’m hoping that the correct answer to that question is teachers and students, but I’m not convinced that is the truth.

One final quote from the article to close:

“Just as vinyl records are still listened to, and considered better than the digital format, they exist without having a real impact on the music industry. In effect, blogs are the vinyl records of the Internet.”

I don’t have a record player any more, but I do have a blog and while we all go through cycles of life and writing, I don’t plan on giving it up any time soon. Records are undergoing a renaissance of sorts right now, there is no reason blogs for learning can’t do the same thing.

Rebuilding a Reader

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When I first started getting serious about learning from a lot of smart people about edtech, one of the most important things that I did was fill an RSS reader with blog feeds. First of all, I couldn’t believe the time that I saved by logging in to one site and having all of the things I wanted to read in one place, and second of all, filling a reader with feeds that I was interested in was like having access to a gold mine of smart people from around the world who were thinking deeply about issues that I cared about.

Over time, two things happened. The first thing that changed was the time bomb of twitter. While applications like skype had given the edtech community some immediacy in the past, twitter changed things completely. My log in now became a real time conversation with all of those smart people I had been reading. I also found that people started posting links to things they were publishing on their blogs on their twitter account.

My visits to my reader began to fade….

When Google declared war on RSS and the open web by killing off their reader it was a heavy blow for deep thinking and for blogging. At first, I didn’t miss it. I still had twitter after all. But over time, I began to realize that relying on twitter only for what I was going to read and learn was like relying on the remote control of my TV. It put me too much at the whim of other people and things I just happened to see. I had a great form of synchronous communication, but I had lost the intentionality of using asynchronous tools.

So I’m starting to rebuild a reader.

I started with feedly, but I just wasn’t comfortable with it as a tool. And then, strangely enough, I ran into Netvibes. For me, this was like finding a dinosaur out in the bush someplace. Netvibes was one of the original web 2.0 tools that I had used a decade ago. But it wasn’t the old Netvibes; it was new, fast, light and easy to use. I made an account and quickly found that I could use some of their pre loaded apps (like igoogle used to give us) and I could add RSS feeds that I wanted to read. I could switch between a number of layouts that looked like a customized homepage or I could have a more Google reader look.

Very importantly for me as a teacher, I could make pages of feeds on any topic and then share that entire page and all of its feeds with students in my class. We can build our own custom textbook on any topic.

netvibes

So I’m slowly rebuilding a reader for myself and with my class. RSS is an important technology.

Back to Edtech Basics #1 – Information

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I’ve only recently returned to blogging and edtech. As I wrote a few days ago, I’ve been frustrated by some of what I’ve seen lately in the world of edtech. I think that in many ways our “story” has diverged and become plagued with corporations and dollars and politics. If we want the story of edtech to not be about that, but instead about students and teachers and learning about the world in new and deeper ways, we need to take the time to reflect on why we use technology in classrooms. What are our “basics?” What are the reasons that we believe in using technology in classrooms? In this series of blog posts, I hope to start uncovering and understanding those basics.

One of the most basic tenets of using edtech in learning environments has to do with information. Traditionally, most schools (teachers and students alike) had access to only a limited amount of information on any topic. The books held in the local library and the knowledge of the people who could be called to the school comprised almost the sum total of what could be learned.

The internet, of course, dramatically changed that equation. Newspapers from other countries, original primary source documents, countless hours of video, podcasts and almost limitless blogs and webpages make the access to information we had in the past seem almost laughable.

We lose track of that sometimes. Access to vast amounts of information is one of the basic premises of education that has dramatically changed. Need proof? Make the students in your class only use the textbooks they have or your local library when researching any topic. It won’t be long until the access to information you have online becomes appreciated once again.

Access to information brings along many other challenges that need to be acknowledged and worked on:

- filters must be opened as widely as possible to allow access to information of all kinds, in all forms, and from different countries.
- students must be taught search skills in order to locate and evaluate information for quality.
- higher level reading and comprehension skills involving critical reading for bias and purpose must be a central part of any program.
- standards around information access and plagarism must be taught and enforced.
- choices around copyright, copyleft and creative commons must be fully understood

(each of these things on their own is an issue that has been the subject of countless blog posts, articles and books)

Emphasizing access to information in all its forms of course will collide with other edtech basics such as creativity, connections and communication which need to work together.

Devices that are used in learning spaces must allow for access to information from as many places (internet, discussion boards, audio and video, etc) and in as many forms as possible. No one device can do everything, but these basics must be taken into account when making purchasing decisions. Devices must allow students to access, evaluate and consume information from different places and in different forms. (Creating information is also vital, but will be dealt with later).

There can be little doubt that information changes when you have access to technology. In my mind, that easily makes this  a “basic” of edtech.

Starting Again

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I’ve been away…

Like everyone else you hear from on the internet, I’ve been busy. But I’ve also been frustrated by the hamster wheel of edtech. I’ve been blogging and working online for a decade. In the beginning we were excited and fascinated by possibilities for education that we hadn’t imagined before.

But we soon got bogged down. We were distracted by shiny apps and gadgets. We were thrown off course by political agendas, by standardized testing and curriculum changes. The internet changed around us. It moved from being open and international; changing to become more closed and corporate and app-y.  And don’t even get me started on issues of surveillance and privacy.

We lost our way in edtech, sacrificing openness and connections and networks for ease of use and closed ecosystems.

We used to say that the tools don’t matter, but I don’t agree with this anymore. The tools do matter. They matter in what we learn to do, how we learn to use them and in the control that they give us over our connections and our content.

I think we need to get back to basics when it comes to edtech. I don’t mean that we need to give up and abandon it all. I have a classroom filled with laptops, microphones, cameras and robots: I have no intention of giving them all up. But I do think that we need to get back and think about why we want to use technology in our classrooms. What benefit does it have? Why is it worth our limited time and limited dollars? Our story has fragmented into a thousand directions. This makes our community rich and filled with possibilities, but it also poses the danger that others will create an agenda for us.

Edtech isn’t about ipads or chromebooks or a suite of apps. It’s about kids and the connections they create with content and with each other. It’s time to take stock.

What Blogging Was – A Memoir

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The ever thought – full David Weinberger has written a great post on the power of blogging and why it is still vital and important. A great piece of writing that asks us to think about the web that we have and the web that we seem to be losing.

“Blogging mattered to us more deeply than you might today imagine”

“At least among my set of bloggers, we tried to engage with one another and to do so in ways that would build community. We’d “retweet” and comment on other people’s posts, trying to add value to the discussion. Of course not everyone played by those rules, but some of us had hope.”

“And it worked. I made friendships through blogging that maintain to this day, sometimes without ever having been in the same physical space.”

Even the comments are worth reading:

“Facebook really is the new town square. Everyone connects to everyone there. You can’t deny that. But they mostly drink beer and talk about the weather there. It’s a pretty low-brow town square. A great place to distribute your pamphlets, but not really a great place to collaboratively write them.”

The web is a moving target. No one expects it to stay in one place or to quit moving. But as we move more towards centralized services (Facebook, etc) and silos of information; as we learn more each day about how everything that we do online is monitored; and as the web becomes more commercialized than it ever was in the days when everyone had a stack of AOL CDs that they used as coasters; we are losing things that we took for granted.

I believe that many of those things are worth fighting for.

Beginning a Journey

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My wife and I bought our 14 year old son an Arduino Starter kit for his birthday.

We opened it up tonight on the kitchen table and spent an hour or so installing software, sorting through parts and playing.

One of my favourite parts was in the intro to the projects book that came with it:

“Arduino is open and simple. It’s founded on lessons we’ve learned teaching our own classes: if you start with the assumption that learning to make digital technologies is simple and accessible, you can make it so. Suddenly, electronics and code become creative tools that anyone can use – like brushes and paint.”

I like the emphasis on doing, on creating. These are tough skills to learn, but if you are motivated to make something, to solve a problem, to use a tool creatively, you are more likely to stick with it.

I’m looking forward to the journey we’ve got in front of us.

Bringing Heads and Hands Together

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C3

Trend #1 from a few years ago: Put kids online. Give them tools to collaborate, share and learn together. (blogs, flickr, skype, google docs, etc)

Trend #2 from the present: Have kids use some of the amazing tools that are out there to create things. (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, 3D printers, programming, etc)

How and where do these two streams come together?

Both of these trends promote distinct skills in our classrooms and schools. They both are valuable and are worthy of classroom time.

How and where do we bring them together? What are examples of projects and pedagogy that promote both of these sides?

It’s All About the Community

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A few years ago my wife had bought me a telescope as a present. I was ( and still am) very interested in astronomy and this was a great gift for me.

As I learned more about astronomy, one of the things that struck me the most was the amount of pro-am research that was going on. Some amateur astronomers spend thousands of dollars on equipment and have beautiful setups. In fact, many discoveries are being made by amateurs or by collaborations between astronomers who work at labs and others who just love the sky as a hobby.

As I’m digging more into the programming world and the world of makers, it doesn’t take long until you come across this same idea. Makers, programmers and geeks come from across the world. They are all ages and do almost anything you can imagine for a living. Some are hard core code geeks who spend countless hours in this world, while others are hobbyists looking to make and learn something. In education, many people complain about the blogging and edtech world being an echochamber of ideas. In the world of making and building, teachers and students are only a small minority of people involved.

In fact, breaking into this world to gain information and experience requires a full step out of the often closed up world of edtech. In making and programming, it’s all about the community of learners who are willing to work together. In fact, most vendors have been wise enough to help build a community of people around their products who help others to build and tinker.

In the past six months or so, I’ve moved into a few of these communities so that I can learn more myself and so that I can support the kids in my classroom.

 Reddit: Reddit has a reputation of being the web’s ultimate time suck. As well, if you are a person who is easily offended, some of the stuff posted on Reddit may offend you. But the truth is, if you make an account and subscribe to specific sub reddits, you will find a wealth of information on this site. I use Reddit mostly for information about 3D printers in general, about reprap and about Printrbots. There are a number of good programming for beginners sub reddits as well as good Linux and Raspberry Pi information. Reddit is weak on electronics and Arduino information so you may best look elsewhere for that.

Adafruit: Adafruit is an electronics vendor who sell almost everything you would need for any type of project. I was directed to Adafruit’s massive tutorial and learning centre by a very smart high school student I met on twitter who, incidentally, also has his own store for selling Printrbot accessories. Adafruit is an active and busy place.

Raspberry Pi: The Raspberry pi site has an active community of people gathered around it who are up to all sorts of projects. There is good basic programming information here as well as a ton of ideas on using your little machine to do all sorts of things. There is a specific thread here for teachers looking to integrate programming into their classrooms.

Element 14: Element 14 is another vendor I have ordered things from. A great site to buy things from, they sports a less busy community. They definitely deserve credit for trying. They have some great tutorials and even a web series on making, but their forums aren’t as busy as other sites. Lots of people posting things, fewer answers coming back. Element 14 is a great site, but they need some new life breathed into their community for it to truly be a hub for makers and learners.

Printrbot: I bought a Printrbot 3D printer this summer and like any other 3D printer, you can tinker with it for endless hours. It’s a good thing that Printrbot has a solid community around it. I’ve posted a few things in their forums and answers always come back solid and well researched. I’ve tried to give back a little in this space by posting a few answers, but I’m often still too much of a noob to be much help. Valuable site. Great community.

Arduino: I’m just beginning to get into working with Arduino. The possibilities are endless, but the programming and building can be deep. Once again, Arduino has an excellent, vibrant community of builders, tinkerers and makers gathered around it. The video tutorials and forum boards are stuffed with people willing to share.

If you want to get your students involved in the world of building and making, you need to help them get connected with the worldwide community of people who are doing this kind of work.