Last weekend I attended the NAACE Conference in London, and attended Doug Dickinson’s “RUWeb2” presentation. He played a snippet from the following video, which challenges educators to rethink their views on education in a world of Web 2.0, mobile technologies, and rapid content creation and sharing:
(Original video is on the T4 Jordan School district site. All statistics in the film apply to the US.)
What are readers’ thoughts? I agree whole-heartedly with the intentions of the challenge. Wikis, blogs, podcasts and online collaboration and networking tools have massive potential to transform 21st century education in a positive, empowering way.
I still find myself being left with questions though. A few thoughts / questions / musings from me:
Should we try to utilise current “hot” web services in our teaching, or instead seek to only use the principles that make these websites so enticing and “sticky”?
Doug mentioned that work is going on in primary schools utilising Facebook, the social networking tool of the moment. I’m on Facebook myself. It’s great for staying in touch with old school / university friends who have scattered to the four corners of the Earth. (It must be good; it’s 23 year-old creator, Mark Zuckerberg, is rumoured to have turned down an offer of up to $1.4 billion from Yahoo to buy Facebook!). However, I perceive dangers in coopting a service like Facebook for educational use:
- Won’t the site cease to be “cool” if educators start trying to use it for educational purposes?
- Don’t students deserve some separation of their out-of-school online world from their “in-school” online world, space to creatively explore niche interests and passions away from the eyes of teachers and (maybe) other students in their class?
- What happens when the “next big thing” comes along, and the students move away from Facebook - do educators follow them or stay using the “uncool” old service?
- How do we monitor use of these services? Should we monitor them?
- How can schools handle Professional Development for staff in a world where a new web service can rise from nothing to market domination in a matter of months?
The alternative, of course, is to create education versions of social networking sites, tweaked to maximise the chances of positive, educational interactions and experiences. Local Authorities and schools up and down the UK are doing exactly that - creating or procuring ePortfolio solutions and virtual learning environments with social networking features built in. The problem with this? It’s very difficult to give the educational version the features and usability of the commercial offering. It may always feel like the poor relation of the commercial equivalent . . .
Of course, some commercial web services are already well suited to use in the classroom. It’s very easy to set up a class blog at edublogs, or to use Google Docs, or to set up a class account at del.icio.us, or on Flickr. Students can then take these tools into their out-of-school online world too.
(By the way, there’s a problem with using Facebook in primary schools irrespective of the above. I understand that Facebook has a minimum age of 13 for users, so primary age users are breaking the Terms and Conditions for its use.)
How do we / should we incorporate mobile phones into everyday use in classrooms?
The video above challenges us to use the technology in our students’ pockets for educational purposes. I’ve heard this suggestion in a number of presentations now. Can it really work? Does anyone have a good case study of large scale use of students’ mobile phones in a school environment? Questions:
- How do you deal with the costs associated with data usage / SMS messaging when the devices belong to the students?
- How do you deal with the variety of different devices in students’ pockets? Bluetooth or not? Video camera or not?
- What if a student doesn’t have a phone?
- Are their issues of “phone envy”? (soon to be “iPhone envy”!) Theft?
- How are classroom rules adapted?
I’d love to hear about any research or ideas that readers may have. The benefits of mobile learning are being explored by Wolverhampton’s Learning2Go project and many others around the world. A class of students, each with the same, or similar , handheld device, wi-fi enabled, has the ability to utilise the potential of the web in remarkable ways. They can collaborate on a WhiteBoard using Synchroneyes. They can download podcasts about their topic. They can create media and reflect upon their learning at home. But those devices are expensive. Can we utilise the technology that sits in every teenager’s pocket? Are we, as educators, ready for that?
(In the CLC, the only real use we’ve made of students’ mobile phones has been as a media storage device for students to take work away with them. Students adore using their own phones to store and share podcasts, film or images that they themselves have created. This is their device, their work. You can upload a piece of work to the web and give students the url; maybe 20% will go away and look and tell parents. If you share that work onto mobile phones, they will show it to peers and parents, and share it via Bluetooth with anyone else interested in seeing what they’ve done).
Watch the video again. The challenge is there.
Some links to follow up on:
- RUWeb2 - Doug’s blog
- Learn 4 Life (Leon Cych’s blog. Leon gave another presentation at NAACE on “Spimes, Prims, Tweets and Gots” - interesting stuff)
- Learning2Go
- LearninginHand.com
- Wochr.com - the CLC’s recent collaborative project with schools in New Zealand.
Enjoyed reading these reflections and the questions that they pose. It is only by going down this road we will discover where the road is going.