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Marshall McLuhan was a Smart Guy

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I live in a small enough town that I remember being one of the first people around to own an ipod. True story. One of those big old white ones with the scroll wheel on it. Lots of kids at school asked me about it, but my celebrity was pretty short lives as in only a few weeks they started showing up all over.

I remember getting it and wondering what I was going to fill it up with. Then I discovered Adam Curry and RSS and the podcasts started flowing in. A whole new world. The fact that ipods were being very quickly adopted made podcasting come alive. A new way to participate in the media landscape was being born. Even though podcasting already seems to be slowly dying off, at the time when it first became mainstream, it had the potential to change who was able to produce media and how we consumed it.

I’m wondering now about tablets and literacy. Are they a device that changes things for written text like the combination of ipods and RSS do for audio? (I know I’ve been beating on this drum lately and I apologize if you are sick of it already, but I need to spend some time thinking through these issues. And hey, I pay the bills around here….. so…… )

Written text has been the same as long as it has existed. Certainly it has moved through different forms of appearance (scroll, letter, folio, novel, etc) But it has always been the same. Produced by one or more individuals and consumed by a single person at a time. Even the advance of dedicated ereaders didn’t change this fact. Text was text.

But what happens when we use an app (Kobo, Kindle, etc) to interact with written text on a screen? Does the act of reading become fundamentally different? A written text of this type becomes the centre of an information ecosystem instead of a stand alone artifact. Depending on the app that you are using it may allow you to highlight certain text and make notes on your device. It allows you to highlight something and easily share it with others via email, twitter or facebook. It allows you to pursue links that might be embedded directly in the text, instantly track down references from endnotes, search for further information on the same topic, get words defined and segue off onto tangental lines of thinking. You can find and download other books on the same topic or written by the same author. While others may argue that we could do all of those things before the combination of apps, tablet and internet combination came along, the ease and ability to complete these tasks all without leaving your couch makes me wonder if this is something different.

Which brings me to Marshall McLuhan.

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Understanding Media, 1964

Podcasting quickly grew into something different after Apple decided it would have a section of iTunes dedicated to these productions. It quickly lost its indie feel when corporations began to produce their own full programs complete with sponsorship and commercials.

What happens now that tablets and internet connections and apps like Kobo and Kindle become widespread? Does the act of reading become different for those with the money to afford the technology? Do those without the technology, who cannot forge the instant international connections and community around a given text read with an “accent?” Are people reading paper books missing out on all of the possibilities that reading any given text might be? Similar to what happens with any software project, I wonder if our reading skills are being forked?

We’ve built these tools, but now they are shaping our habits, what we do with them, and how we interact with the media we produce and consume. Are software developers and corporations defining what it means to be literate?

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ginatrapani/3553961037/

One Week with an iPad

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As is often true with tech trends, I’m behind. I’ve spoken out a few times against tablets in classrooms  without admittedly spending a whole lot of time with one. While I’ve had an android tablet and a Blackberry Playbook, both of them had some limitations and I never made an honest, serious attempt at integrating one into how I use technology day to day.

About a week ago I wrote a post outlining how, through a Town of Snow Lake initiative, I’ve ended up with an iPad. We are attempting to cut back on paper and this seemed like a good place to begin. After about a week this is what I’ve noticed:

1.) A massive increase in the amount of time looking at screens. I try to spend a bit of time reading my Bible each morning: now its on my ipad. The few books that I’m reading right now: transferred to Kobo and Kindle apps on ipad. Sent dozens of emails, attended a few different meetings: all documents on screen, spent far too much time in the app store and in set up mode: all on a screen. While I certainly spent a lot of time with my laptop before I got he ipad, now it seems as if all of the documents I work with are on a screen. I’ve noticed that I have sore eyes in the evening and I’m guessing that it’s due to all of the screen time. Great to have access to most of the things I need in an average day in one place and on one device, bad that it all revolves around a screen. Paper seems to have almost disappeared completely.

2.) Meetings. The tablets were purchased in order that we could significantly reduce our paper use in the municipality at the council and office level. The amount of paper that even a small local government produces is stunning. One (yes, one) meeting I was at last week, between all of the people present, used approximately 3200 pieces of paper. It is simply unbelievable. When it comes to handling pdfs, calendaring dates for meetings, searching up quick pieces of information while you are in discussions, the tablet works flawlessly. I don’t know why, but I find it far easier to read from compared to my laptop screen. The way you sit with it? The way it is propped up on its case? The retina screen? For this purpose, the machine has quickly become an effective and efficient tool.

3.) The Apple Ecosystem. I’m not new to Apple products by any stretch. I’ve had laptops made by them and ipods for years. But in the ipad, the entire content ecosystem, the depth of the app store, music, movies, books and tv shows shines through. While I haven’t actually gone too crazy overheating my Visa, ( I think I’ve spent about $50 total on apps that were needed to fully get the machine up and running to meet my needs), I can see how people send all kinds of cash to Cupertino. $2 here, $5 there. It would be very easy to do. This machine works flawlessly at consuming content.

4.) Content Creation. I read this week a deep reflection and well written article about the ipad as a content creation device vs a content consumption device. This has always actually been my sticking point for tablets as useable machines in a classroom. There is no doubt that they do what they do very well. But can they do what we need in classrooms? I’m still out on this one. Since I’ve had it I’ve pounded out emails, two blog posts and dozens of twitter updates, but this is pretty small stuff. I wouldn’t call the ability to write 140 characters content creation. Even the blog posts that I’ve written on the tablet were smaller ones that were simply text. The larger things I’ve written this week (an edtech article for a magazine, a regular newspaper column I write as mayor, this post as well as another one) were all written on my laptop. I’m not confident enough to try to work in html mode, or to multi task to find and insert pictures, etc on the tablet. I wonder if these more complex tasks will ever be easy on that device. I would suspect not. I guess this might come down to the difference between tasks that might be looked at as “microcreation” compared to “macrocreation” as are talked about in the blog post I’ve linked to above. Are there apps that let you create things and pundits who say that the ipad is the greatest content creation device the world have ever known? Of course. I’m not one of them.

5.) Screen Size. There is nothing magical about the screen size of the ipad. When it comes to screens I’ve got a 4 inch phone, a 7 inch Playbook, a 10 inch ipad and a 15 inch MacBook Pro. Which is best? It all depends on what you are doing. There are tradeoffs with every device at every size. Even though it has its tech troubles, I still love the size and construction of the Playbook. You can hold it in your hand like a book, throw it into a backpack or briefcase and hardly notice that it is there. The ipad sits in my lap as I use it. It’s too heavy to hold up and read from for any length of time. This means a lot of time with your neck bent over looking down. The big tech news this week is the breathless anticipation that the tech world has for the Google Nexus 7 and the rumours that Apple will be coming out with a 7 inch ipad in the fall. It will be interesting to see how those two pieces are received.

Overall, the device of course just works. Apple has sold millions of them for a reason. They are slick and well designed. Able to use our fingers to draw and write like we are finger painting back in elementary school, ipads have made technology even simpler to use and very personal. A device that can go anywhere with us and meet most of our needs. But, as always, the sticking point is in the trade offs. What do you need the device for most of the time? How and where will it be used? How much time do you want to spend with it during the day? Is multimedia work or other complex creation tasks an important part of what you do?

It’s interesting how fast the ipad has become an easy to pull off of the shelf piece of technology. I’ll grab it instead of my laptop if I need to do something small and quick. It constantly serves up new and interesting content in innovative ways. It reminds me of something that Neil Postman would have envisioned when he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. Harsh? Possibly. But possibly valid as well.

 

Coding as Self – Expression

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I’m not a massive coding geek like some people I know.

I can hold my own and do what I need to do when I’m working with a number of languages, but coding skills are something that I would really like to work on.

The New York Times has published a series about coding. Calling the rising number of coding students “Computer Science’s Sputnik Moment,” there are a few interesting articles to mull over in the series. But one of them struck me more deeply than the others. That is the article by Jeanette Wing who is the head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. The article is entitled Software as Self – Expression.

In it she says:

“Today’s students have grown-up tech savvy. They live in a world of exploring the Web and of personalizing their devices. Cyberspace is the anytime, anywhere laboratory where you can design and run your own experiments by writing just a little software. It’s affordable by anyone with access to the Internet. And each piece of software is an individual’s expression of creativity, much like poetry or music. Computer science can be fun and empowering.”

and

“When people talk about the smart grid, smart vehicles, and smart buildings — what makes them “smart”? Computer science. When people talk about personalized medicine and personalized learning, how do you think personalization is possible? Computer science”

Software as self expression. Coding as an art form.

While we’ve heard this before, after all, something similar is WordPress‘ motto: “Code is Poetry,” I think professor Wing does a particularly good job of putting this thought out there in this article.

John Davitt and I once had a conversation about “struggleware.” This is software that allows people (forces people) to experiment, to think, to solve problems in order to make things. There is getting to be more and more good examples of software floating around that does this.

- Scratch
- Alice
- Lego Mindstorms
- Minecraft
- The Powder Toy
- Waterbear
- Garageband
- Aviary

on and on.

I would even throw software like WordPress on to this list. WordPress is free and open source. It can be hacked open and customized in countless ways, allowing people to make something they are interested in. This is the creativity, the self expression, the art form that coding skills give you access to. While I don’t believe everyone needs to be a high level programmer, I think everyone needs at least a basic understanding of how to work with, control, and create using technology.

I can’t draw or paint. I don’t know how to sing and I don’t play an instrument. But I can write some code. Even having a few skills gives me a chance to express myself.

How many kids out there are the same way?

Mozilla’s Hackasaurus

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I picked this up in a regular email I get from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Spotlight, but I thought it was well worth repeating here.

Mozilla has committed to teaching students to hack up the web, changing things to make it more personalized for them and teaching students to make webpages do things they are interested in.

Did you know you can change Google’s homepage to show your own picture instead of their logo?

What about forcing webpages to display certain kinds of information in certain ways?

Hackasuarus is a program and set of tools that can be used to teach students to “see through” the visible layer of the web to the code behind it and manipulate it in simple ways. This is the kind of stuff that I think about when I talk about coding being a literacy. Every kid doesn’t need to be a full on coding guru, but we all know how to manipulate and change written, alphabetic text; should we not have the same skills with code?

This quote sums up the argument for me:

“A lot of public schools just assume, ‘Oh, kids these days are digital natives, so we don’t need to teach them anything about computers. Whereas all of these kids that we’re talking to now, they’ve never had any kind of computer classes. They know how to use Facebook, but nothing else.”

StudentSpeak Webiode 23 from Spotlight on Vimeo.

Literacy: Brought to you by ….

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“We find when writing moves online, the connections between ideas and people are much more apparent than they are in the context of a printed book.”

This quote comes from Bob Stein, the founder and co-director of the MacArthur funded institute called The Future of the Book.

Stein goes on to say:

“what we’ve discovered is that when you move the function of reading and writing online, the social aspect comes forward.”

We like to pretend in schools that reading and writing are social actions, but we only want to go so far. We need individual grades after all. But when someone creates a document and shares that with others, some of whom collaborate on turning the content  into a video while others remix that and make an animation or a photo essay; it begs all sorts of questions about ownership, creativity and the neat multiple step writing process that we use in classrooms.

As digital textbooks become more common, combining various pieces of multimedia into a single text and allowing us to access information on a variety of devices, we will be forced to think continually about our definition of literacy.

I’ve been wondering this lately: has our concept of literacy simply been arrived at by default? Up to this point in time the texts we have been technologically capable of producing has meant that most of them have been paper based, read by individuals and based on transferring information via written text.

What happens when the default changes? What happens when texts are freed from many of their historical constraints?

Of course, we are living through this change right now. We are surrounded by electronic texts of all types. Sales of ebooks are on the rise. Smart phones bring us information wherever we are and sales of tablets over the past year have been enormous. More and more of the texts that we consume are electronically based, meaning that we have the constant possibility of them containing multimedia, being easily shared with others, globally accessible and constantly updated.

One concern about this change is that literacy for the first time in history is also being partially defined by corporations. This isn’t a conspiracy theory of some sort. It is simply true that as large corporations introduce new features into their products, they get incorporated into our concept of being literate. A simple example is that of iTunes and podcasting. When podcasting was first introduced, it was in a “below the radar” type of way. Finding content was often difficult and as RSS had only been introduced shortly before hand, finding software allowing you to subscribe to a feed required some searching. All of this changed when Apple built podcasting features into iTunes. Podcasting went mainstream. Accessible by millions, the entire genre took off, changed, went corporate and became much more polished.

As computing platforms diverge and seek to distinguish themselves from others, what happens to our ideas of literacy and our literacy skills when Apple offers one type of platform, Google another, Linux a third and Microsoft something completely different? Will we need a “Shakespeare by Google” class while another offers a “Shakespeare by Linux?” Will these two texts contain fundamentally different information? What happens when corporations sponsor the hardware in a school or district? Will students be illiterate when they transfer?

This is why open models are important. As we make purchases at the school or division level, as we think about 1:1 or BYOL programs, models of information access, availability and display are important factors to consider. What model of literacy are you considering for your students?

Definition

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We decided to take part in the Canwest spelling bee in our school.

One of the words included in  this test is “literacy.” Being an “official” spelling bee, they have also included definitions for each word to read out in the classroom.

The definition of literacy that has been included: “the ability to read a short simple passage and answer questions about it.”

Needless to say – I didn’t use it.

Building Self Assessment into Assessment

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As part of the assessment program of our division, three times each year I have to complete a reading and writing continuum for each student in my class. Often used poorly in classrooms and abused by teachers, I have struggled with these myself. Last year I decided to make a change – I decided to have my students fill them out before I did.

These assessments are simply photocopied on large pieces of paper. We have a working copy in our classrooms that we use throughout the year. As the close of the school year approaches in June, we are supposed to complete them one final time and then transfer our data to a final copy that is kept in the student’s cumulative file in the office.

After completing this process several times, I decided that it was nonsensical for me to be parsing student skills in these ways without their input – so I decided to involve them. I took the parts of both the reading that writing continuum that usually involved my students and attempted to turn some of the descriptors into kid friendly language. I then made theses two assessments into google docs templates. Doing this, my students were able to search for them, access their own copies and rename them. I simply asked them to name them like this “Joan’s Writing Standards.” This way, when both sets of standards were completed and shared with me, I was able to quickly scan through my docs files and find who I was looking for.

So after locating the templates online and renaming them, I had my students work do a self assessment of their own reading and writing skills. It took my students approximately 40 minutes to complete each of these sets of standards.

This was an interesting process. The first thing I noticed is that many of my students were either interested or worried about being involved in this process. They knew this was a required divisional assessment so they wanted to “look their best.” We talked long and hard instead about being honest and open. About being fair to themselves, but also open about their weaknesses. I stressed the fact that this was not a “right or wrong” kind of assessment. It was a continuum that they were making progress along. In the end, it was my impression that most of my students were able to complete this fairly well.

I think that this entire process needs revision and work. I need to do a better job making sure that the criteria are in kid friendly language and that students understand what the descriptors mean. I also need to ensure that students become more familiar with parsing their skills into subsets like these. To them, reading and writing are simple monoliths – they read, and they write. Helping them see their success as a combination of these skills might help them to set goals for improvement for themselves. Have to see second term how this goes.

Oh, and by the way, I also do this with the work skills / personal development section of my report card. I have the students reflect on their progress and then I use their data, along with mine as I complete this first section of their reports.

As always, your thoughts about this process or any suggestions you might have about how to make these forms more user friendly are welcome. If you can use these continua in any way, please feel free to take and remix.

Reading Aloud – With a few Twists

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Over the last two weeks, Heather Durnin and I have worked to bring the kids in the Idea Hive closer together on a daily basis.

We’ve been reading one novel with our two classes, but we’ve been doing it over skype. Wondering what kind of support we can bring to a text with tech tools, we decided to take a novel (in our case The Book Thief) and read it aloud to our classes. Each day at 10:30 AM Snow Lake time (11:30 in Wingham) our two classrooms meet on skype and we take turns reading this powerful novel. One day Heather reads aloud, the next day I do. But the person who isn’t reading also has a job to do – they run a backchannel. The Book Thief can be a difficult text for kids to understand, it takes a lot of discussion to fill in blanks and talk through the context of young teens growing up in Nazi Germany. So we decided to add a backchannel to the reading. While one of us reads, the kids in both classrooms and the other teacher chat in a today’s meet room, discussing the text, asking questions, making predictions and dropping in great pieces of the text as it is read aloud over skype.

Also, each day after we are finished our approximately 20 minutes of reading, we have set up a wall where the students from each class post their thoughts, opinions, questions, predictions and ideas from the day’s reading.

Doing a read aloud this way has been a great experience for a few reasons:

1.) The students get ongoing support with the text, live and in real time as it is being read aloud. Instead of just sitting in their desks listening and being interested or confused, they are able to post what is going on in their heads in this chat room getting instant feedback and support from 44 other students.

2.) They are getting all sorts of new and different perspectives on the text that they probably would not come up with on their own. Learning is stronger in a network than alone.

3.) Each day the chats and the wall are examined. As teachers, we can quickly see the students who are lost and confused giving us an opportunity to target them in our instruction. This way, we have a written record of the kinds of questions that are being asked and the troubles that kids are having.

As part of this, I examined the first two chats and found a few interesting things:

1.) The kids are making few predictions about what is being read to them. This is an area that we need to target.

2.) As the kids get more comfortable with this process, they are interacting with each other more and more. In the first two chats alone, there was a significant jump in the number of students who were either posing questions about what was being read, or responding to the questions of others. While the first chat definitely did see some interaction, the second saw a dramatic increase in this.

3.) Those with more IM experience have quickly taught others some of the conventions of working like this. For example, in the first chat, one student typed an “@” symbol to answer a question posed by another. This quickly spread and is now standard. As well, the students will type an “*” symbol to correct a spelling error they made in one posting to correct it in another. When this first emerged in a chat, one student specifically asked  another what it meant. Answered that the “*” is used to correct something. Once again, this has spread throughout the room and is now standard.

4.) There have been 546 postings in the chatrooms between the two reading sessions.  While there certainly have been some off – task comments posted, these have been very few. That shows the amount of activity that is going on in the minds of our students as we read to them. Constructing meaning is certainly not a passive, receptive process.

Since we’ve started we’ve had to read a few times on our own because of technical difficulties or scheduling problems, and to be honest, it’s been kind of a lonely experience. Once you start working in networked ways like this, the power of being together is something that you expect. Working on your own just isn’t the same.

Media Manipulation

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Part of being literate in our time is understanding how the media can be controlled or manipulated. I teach kids in my classroom how to take photos and edit them for various effects or to show a certain point of view. I teach them how to make videos that show things that are not really there. I teach them to caption photos in different ways to represent different biased opinions.

The reason behind this is simple: I believe that if students know these things are possible, if they have experience working in these ways, they will think more critically about the media they are consuming. Knowing what is possible gives them a “peek behind the curtain.”

Take the two minutes to watch this video below. While I don’t agree with the politics of the Tea Party, being Canadian, I haven’t posted this video to discuss them and what they do. I live on the North side of the border and what they do only effects me indirectly. What I am interested in is the method of media manipulation and control that is being espoused here.

I am not foolish enough to believe that the media was not manipulated in the past before 2.0 tools were available. As well, I believe that this video could probably have been shot from the other political perspective. I presume groups on the left are involved in this same type of work. What is the effect of work like this on public opinion? How much influence do campaigns like this have?

This is another literacy skill that we need to make kids aware of. The possibilities of opinion manipulation are huge. There are ethical questions about teaching skills like this. How do we teach these types of skills without taking part in activities like these? Do we allow students to participate from their own views or do we simply warn them that they need to be aware?

The continuing evolution of needed skills.

Is it Real?

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This week I gave the students in my class the task of deciding if two websites were real or not.

Building on earlier work of reading the Junk Detector piece I had written and evaluating websites for design, I gave them two websites, Air Asia and Dog Island and asked them to work through a process of deciding if these sites were real or not.

It was interesting listening to the self talk of the students, the questions they were asking and their comments about these sites; both of which they knew nothing about. I gave them this worksheet (pdf) as a scaffold to help them test out some of the strategies talked about in the Junk Detector piece.

For example when they talked about Air Asia, they asked questions like: are these cities real? Can I pretend to book a flight? What are the restrictions about where, when and who can fly? How much money are these flights worth in Canadian dollars (as they then open a new tab and head to a currency convertor). What do the sites linking back to Air Asia teach me about them?

In the end, most of the students made the right decisions about these places. Most of them decided that Air Asia is real and Dog Island isn’t. It was an interesting process and it was great to see the evaluation skills that my students have move on to a higher level.

Please take, use, and modify these resources as you wish.