In looking at how blogs can be used to support an inquiry stance in teacher professional development, perhaps it might be important to look at how the technological design of blogs influences could be helpful for teachers using the space for their action research.

Teacher inquiry or action research involves educators participating in fieldwork investigations of particular classrooms. Teacher inquiry and action research can focus on a number of topics including learner behaviors, effective lesson design, the physical arrangement of the classroom and how it affects learning outcomes, etc. No topic or element of teaching and learning is off limits to action research and teacher inquiry.

Teacher inquiry and action research emphasizes a detailed understanding of the teaching learning environment and the actors within that environment. It is based on participant observation in which the educator, already immersed in the classroom environment, describes what learners do and what they experience doing it. Educators conducting this type of research must also be able to recognize and report on their own actions and perceptions of what they themselves are experiencing, as well as remain cognizant of the potential conflicts and biases when acting as both participant and researcher.

Teacher inquiry involves reflecting on classroom practice, devising a plan to improve or enhance educator and learner achievement, implementing the plan or treatment, and then reporting on the treatment and its results. Most often this type of systematic inquiry takes place for educators participating in a class to support their own professional development. In such a class setting, educators have an opportunity to work with other educator peers that can add to a sense of community, foster the ability to share information, and provide multiple levels of social support and feedback.

It is my contention that weblogs provide a particularly helpful environment that allows educators to record and share their thoughts, treatment plans, and analyses. Weblogs also provide a place where educators can seek counsel and advice from peers, hold informal conversations about related and unrelated topics, as well as network with other educators from a variety of institutions. Weblogs also provide an environment that permits teacher educators to study issues such as self-presentation and reflective thinking that in turn refines research and understanding of teacher professional development.

To see how weblogs might be an appropriate place to share action research projects, it might be helpful to consider Geraldine Fitzpatrick’s Locales Framework (1998). This framework uses the notion of locales to assist system designers in understanding “the social organization of activity and to support design activities that take these activities into account” (Dourish, 2004, p. 92).

The five primary aspects of the Locales Framework are:

• Foundations
• Civic Structure
• Individual Views
• Interaction Trajectory
• Mutuality

Foundations involve a group of individuals (i.e., a social dynamic) brought together for a general commitment to cooperative action and the sites that define the locale. Foundational elements also include an understanding of how communication will take place in order to orient the group towards achieving their goals.

The Locales Framework allows a designer to address the social dynamics of a particular group based on such rudiments as membership, duration, structure, roles, culture, focus, and tasks. For Fitzpatrick, a locale, be it virtual or physical, exists out of the relationship between a group of individuals (i.e., a social world), the sites or the domains of activity, and the means or items available for accomplishing these activities.

Civic Structure addresses how the locale involves others. Since the meaning of actions involves the actions and knowledge that precedes and follows, locales are properly understood then in relation to others.

Since individuals make up the flavor, perspectives, concerns and roles of a particular locale, designers are able to address these perspectives within the Individual Views aspect of the framework.

Trajectories are the courses of action defined by the social world within the design framework. The Interaction Trajectory serves a means of understanding how a social world develops, “how people enter and leave, and how the activities in which they engage contribute to the various courses of action” with which the group of individuals are occupied (Dourish, 2004, p. 94). In a temporal sense, Trajectory provides designers a way to think about the multidimensional phases of actions that the social world is a part of – the various stages, tempos, and agendas.

Mutuality refers to how group members make their presence known to others in order to maintain both their actions and their interactions with the social world.

According to Dourish (2004), the Locales Framework is not a theory of designing social action, but a set of “sociological understandings” that can be employed to “inform the analysis of working situations and the design of technologies to support cooperative work” (Dourish, 2004, p. 94).

Thus, we may infer that when considering cooperative virtual environments for teaching and learning, we need to insure that the systems we design promote the social organization of action rather than limit or deny it. The Locales Framework provides an example to approach learning design in light of technological and sociological analysis.


Using blogs as a collaborative virtual environment to support teacher inquiry

Using the Locales Framework, weblogs aid teacher inquiry and action research in the following ways:

At the Foundations level, weblogs can be used as a place to orient the group towards achieving their goals. A central motherblog can be created for managing accessibility, orienting participants towards shared artifacts and objectives, and providing a setting for particular forms of interaction.

At the Civic Structure level, the motherblog can address the role of participants, building on the Foundation level, making sure participants are clear as to what their individual blogs are to be used for and how participants are to engage each other (as well as engaging outside visitors). The Civic Structure offers a framework for Individual Views, providing direction for participation as well as offering clear rules of how to use their individual blog space.

The Interaction Trajectory again builds on the Foundation level by orienting and focusing participants on the tasks at hand including the course agenda, step-by-step processes, projects, timelines, and other requisite rules of the road (e.g., assignment duration, organizational and structural formats, roles and responsibilities, and cultural considerations). Before participants get too far along in their research, the notion of Mutuality should be addressed by engaging participants in a discussion of how the social world and each participants roles are to be maintained on the motherblog and their own individual blogs.

A weblog is more than a communication tool

As I’ve argued previously, weblogs are more than simply communication tools. In terms of teacher professional development, teacher inquiry, and action research, blogs provide a useful place for fostering communication, collaboration, and cognitive apprenticeship. Teacher educators can use a motherblog noted above as a place to model behavior, coach participants, scaffold learning, articulate issues, reflect and explore ideas presented in participants’ research. This is why I become quite concerned when I read articles that posit how blogs should and should not be used. Using weblogs in teaching and learning is an emergent practice of complex patterns evolving from basic principles. Blogs can readily be designed for both dynamic interactivity and static information delivery. I believe this is the beauty of the medium for teaching and learning: Blogs can be customized to serve our changing needs; a space that can be configured for a variety of appropriate uses. By this I do not mean to suggest that what works in one learning environment works for all learning environments. As Dourish points out, “the key question is to understand how the relationship between technology and social action comes to be worked out in different situations, and from these to understand how the features of technological design and the features of everyday social settings are related” (Dourish, 2004, p. 97). As an educational researcher, using weblogs to support teacher inquiry and action research provides a novel environment to study issues that affect educators as well as refine the fields’ understanding of how computer-mediated communication can serve to enhance established practice.



Off-line references:

Dourish, P. (2004). Where the action is: The foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Fitzpatrick, G. (1998). The locales framework: Understanding and designing for cooperative work. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Queensland.

I had a great discussion with two members of my doctoral committee today about studyingthe notion of  social software and the co-creation of knowledge.

What social software like blogs and wikis provide us is the ability to share knowledge and build understanding. This probably seems relatively obvious to most readers of this blog but it has given me a clearer focus for my own research.

Wikipedia defines Social Software as computer programs that enable people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.

Here’s where I feel like I’ve hit a snag: If I were to say social software is "bottom-up" software, that it supports the desire of individuals to affiliate with others, can I say that is serves both formal and informal educational modalities? If social software supports the notion of individual choice, how does it best serve formal educational environments?

There are many examples of edubloggers who have introduced blogs and wikis into their classrooms with varying degrees of success. It would seem in this sense that social software was more of a top-down initiative, selected by the instructor instead of by the learner. In this light, is it still considered social software as I have defined it? Does it still support the desire of individuals to affiliate with others or is it another formal means for directing learning?

Your thoughts and comments are much appreciated.

I heart teh intarweb!  I rly do.

I recently decided to re-explore the definition of social software. As such, I posted a question to the edublogosphere and received a handful of helpful responses. No, Howard Rheingold didn’t respond. I guess he must be busy or something….

So what have I discovered?

Well, lots of people have written about the definition of social software in much better ways than I possible can. What I’m hoping to do in this essay is to share a few nuggets in an attempt to refine our collective understanding of the term.

History of Social Software
 
For a top notch history of Social Software, a good place to start is Christopher Allen’s Life with Alacrity blog posting Tracing the Evolution of Social Software.

My first citing dates back to March 2003 in an online essay by Clay Shirky where he adopts a sociological perspective on the topic. Essentially, social software is/are programs that run on a computer that support communication and interaction among groups of people in a computer-mediated environment. Shirky suggests that social software is unique to the Internet. It supports both directed (e.g., task-oriented) and undirected (e.g., communal) communication, and is generally designed to be easily used by participants.

Although the term transactional distance is most commonly associated with distance education, it would seem social software bridges a fundamental transactional distance associated with computer-mediated communication. In other words, groups of people are able to communicate regardless of time and space, i.e., not everyone participating in a particular discussion must be at the same place at the same time in order for the discussion to take place. And as such, a new set of social patterns begin to emerge.

A new set of social patterns

Social software is about supporting group experience given a range of diverse personality types. From a design perspective, this can create a number of difficulties that calls for deeper examination.

Social software must be designed to support both the needs of the individual and the needs of the group. Thus, to a large extent, social software is political in nature. Like any environment where people interact, there is a set of unspoken or invisible social rules that govern behavior; consequently, the design of a particular piece of social software influences how people behave, forcing or requiring certain behaviors while excluding others.

Tom Coates and a host of well- and lesser-known scholars make several interesting observations about the nature of social software which I have attempted to encapsulate here for further reflection.

Social software is designed to augment social collaboration via structured mediation (this mediation may be distributed or centralized, top-down or bottom-up/emergent). So, depending on the goals of the group or the group leader, social software should offer a host of ways to organize people so that they may interact and/or work together. In this sense, social software is a tool, a device, an instrument that permits or mediates the accomplishment of an action (i.e., the proverbial finger pointing at the moon).

This brings us to an interesting place. Social software can be viewed in several important ways: as a medium or channel that supports an exchange, a tool for accomplishing particular tasks, or an ecology where people, practices, and values connect, interact, and evolve.

We also need to be careful in assuming what social software can and cannot provide. From an ecological perspective, social software can remove certain limitations and compensate for some human inadequacies, yet what is an advantage or strength in one setting can be a disadvantage or weakness in another.

Economies of Scope

The idea of social software being a tool can be argued to connote the notion of efficiency and productivity that, to some extent, reinforce the idea that efficiency and productivity are among the driving goals of our collective existence. (hmmmm….)

On the Zephoria blog, Mike T. suggests that social software offers an opportunity for a bottom-up share of the Web:

Can social software - which is built on a collaboration/sharing/synergy paradigm - thrive in an evironment that is chiefly reliant on the possession and protection of knowledge as a market good. In a limited view, this is mirrored in the neverending "opensource vs. prop. software" debate. In a larger context, social software - as it is an innovation in the Schumpeterian sense - is a challenge to all those economies and social orders, that are realiant [sic] on protecting individual rights to own information to the same degree that one can own houses or cars.
Social software is thus a mutation of traditional corp-to-market software, because it reverses the mechanism. Viewed from a technological standpoint, it forms a networked organisation on "market/consumer" level and grows in importance, so as to rival other software products. In a sociological sense, it enables grassroots coordination, therefore strengthening the influence of all the Joe Bloggs out there, thus putting into question the whole idea of a hierarchical society.

Teaching and Learning

In terms of social software’s impact on teaching and learning, Ulises Mejias suggests that social software’s

true potential lies in helping us figure out how to integrate our online and offline social experiences. Thus, social software must live up to its name by relating to the individual's everyday social practices, which include interacting with people online as well as people without access to these technologies…. [S]ocial software can positively impact pedagogy by inculcating a desire to reconnect to the world as a whole, not just the social parts that exist online.

Mejias’ definition of social software adds a nice twist: [it] allows people to interact and collaborate online or that aggregates the actions of networked users.

The notion of aggregation, of pulling together or clustering ideas or objects as well as people, is a nice refinement. Social software not only allows people (citizens/netizens) to collect, communicate, and collaborate, it allows data, information, and objects to be combined and consolidated, a place where both can converge.

Final thoughts

Bill Fitzpatrick offers a way to think about social software that is quite tempting. Building on the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on social software, his definition reads:

social software allows people to rendezvous, connect, and collaborate; the collaboration permitted by social software can lead to expanded communities of people sharing common interests. It's less about a computer-mediated space, and more about common ground.

Bill’s definition captures a comfortable middle ground that underlies a general consensus among a host of writers, researchers, and philosophers.

In terms of addressing the bottom-up/top down considerations of social software in a teaching and learning environment, Clarence Fisher offers another thoughtful perspective:

As computer-literate as we often think kids are, one thing I have learned about working with technology and middle school students is that their experience with software such as this is often limited. They need to be taught to see the value of technologies such as these. My students have blogs, we have made vlogs and podcasts, we have a class Suprglu page, a wiki, and they each have a Bloglines account. Certinaly all of the kids do not derive equal value from each of these tools, and they do not use each equally. This is where the concept of choice comes in. The kids need to be introduced to each of the tools and technically learn how to use them; but once this is finished, my kids often have a choice about which they will use. Kids need to learn how reap the added value of a technologically connected, possibly internationally based, learning network. It is certainly work for them, and it changes our work as teachers, but it is vital that they are given experiences that allow them to see this.

So what have I learned from all of this?

The Internet provides me an opportunity, or more precisely, an ecology to connect, collaborate, and aggregate numerous ideas and contributions of others which permits me to further my understanding and share it with others. In this sense, social software like this blog contributes to my ability to co-create knowledge that I will continue to draw from, reflect upon, and further refine. I hope you find it useful too.

Et tu?

Photo credit:

No. 7 by Mark Rothko, 1960, located here.

Given the recent debate regarding the struggle to control Internet access from China to MySpace, several items have been bubbling up in my thoughts. As such, I found myself turning to the writings of Andrew Feenberg.

It would be nice to think that technology and social computing as a neutral activity requiring no explanation or justification.

Yet the social and economic success of the Internet has meant that it has an inherent political impact. And as such the Internet is both political and politicized wherein many people have begun calling to question the relationships involving its authority and power.

To this end the Internet serves as an instrument, a form of power that affords notions of efficiency, mechanical and mental advantage in accomplishing tasks.  In this regard, such tools can be used to shape our way of life where means and ends are difficult to separate. How we use the Internet has a certain effect on who we are and what we can become.

So who should decide how we use the Internet?

Our world, our lives are more than a series of technical activities. Yet the power associated with the Internet, the power to connect and freely share ideas and information is regularly under threat of political determinism and uncritical rationalization.

Even though the Internet and social computing appears rhetorically susceptible to ideological domination, it is not inherently so.  Since the Internet has no singular nature and is socially dependent, it can be restructured to play different roles in different social systems (Feenberg, 1999, p.7).

In other words, the beauty of technologies like the Internet according to Feenberg is its inherent ambivalence.

At stake in the ambivalence of technology is not merely the limited range of uses supported by any given technological design, but the full range of effects of whole technological systems (Feenberg, 1999, p.7).

In other words, the range of uses and the associated effects of the Internet and social computing are not wholly situated with one particular application. Computer applications regularly grow, change, become modified, mashed-up, and morph into designs quite different than the original authors’ intent. Given the ambiguous nature and range of Internet technologies this makes it all the more difficult to determine its consequences thus making it more difficult to dominate. (Think Frankenstein’s monster!)

In this light, the Internet and social computing represent an ideology, one that is socially constructed and eschews a great deal of control. The values controversy currently sweeping through governments, legislatures, and the mass media points to the tremendous political and economic power associated with this uniquely subversive ideology. The power to connect and freely communicate threatens oppressive regimes and corporate domination across the globe.

The Internet and social computing are a natural extension of what nature and human beings are and what we might become. For those who have become wealthy and socially powerful at the expense of nature and other humans blithely seek to maintain control and subordinate technologies like the Internet in the name of protecting the interests of the system.

So what can be done?

Although I cannot provide a quick answer and an easy solution, it’s important to note that we are all in this together. Politicians, businessmen and women, technicians, school teachers, luddites, consumers, producers…

They meet in the design process where they wield their influence by proffering or withholding resources, assigning purposes to new devices, fitting them into prevailing technical arrangements to their own benefit, imposing new uses on existing technical means, and so on. (Feenberg, 1999, p. 11).

So, at this point, we as actors participating in the network ecology have a number of choices. The Internet and social computing are neither neutral nor autonomous. And there are inherent limits to power and control. We can engage those seeking to limit and control our use, we can ignore them, we can adapt and find new ways of preserving our freedoms, we can invent new ways of connecting and communicating, and we can adopt a combination of strategies to support our desires, our identities, and our relationships. Similarly, Feenberg cites de Certeau who suggests that systems such as the Internet are “vulnerable to tactical transformation.”

The anti-program is thus not merely a source for disorder but can recodify the network around new programs that realize unsuspected potentialities (Feenberg, 1999, p. 117).

The answers are not simple as the issue of freedom is never a black and white one. As Ulises Mejias notes

Technology can facilitate more than one type of technological civilization, and each generation must struggle to define which type of civilization it wants, or have someone else's desires imposed on them. There is no point in waiting for the democratic technologies of the future, because they have always been at our reach. This is certainly true when we look at what is going on in the Open Source, Open Content and Open Learning movements (greatly facilitated by Social Software). And it is also true when we look at other grassroots expressions of democracy that do not require the kind of affordances embodied by Social Software (let's not assume that only a society with access to these technologies can give expression to democracy!).

The world is still our oyster. But we need to provide for it by fostering a healthy ecology so that it may grow and thrive with others of its own accord.

Online References:

Fryer, W. (2006). Censored for relevance. Moving at the speed of creativity weblog. Retrieved 11 May 2006 from http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2006/04/11/censored-for-relevance/

Guhlin, M. (2006). Not a whisper. Around the corner weblog. Retrieved 11 May 2006 from http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/blog/archives/2006/04/entry_139

Mejias, U. (2006). “Socialist” software. Ideant weblog. Retrieved 11 May 2006 from http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2006/05/socialist_softw.html#mor

Richardson, W. (2006). Going global. Weblogg-ed weblog. Retrieved 11 May 2006 from http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/going-global/.

Warlick, D. (2006). You may not get to read this blog. 2 cents Worth weblog. Retrieved 11 May 2006 from http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/05/11/you-may-not-get-to-re


Off-line Reference:

Feenberg, A. (1999). Questioning technology. London: Routledge.

This is a loaded question, no?

What should schooling provide individuals and society? What knowledge, skills, and abilities are critical, are valued and valuable? (In this regard, we might ask what does a good education afford?)

A colleague of mine often reduces such an argument down to an economic perspective: in a world of limited resources, what choices and decisions allow for individuals and societies to be successful? This line of reasoning allows us to say what we teach children today shapes their potential tomorrow.

So I ask you, what is a good education?

What do we want children to know and do that will provide them the ability to manage their lives successfully in a world of limited resources? [Does this question properly frame the issue?]

In an earlier post, I noted that there appears to be two paradigms currently shaping the education debate. In my analysis, I chose to examine the debate from the extremes thus polarizing each side in a somewhat reductionist fashion. As such my writing suggested a certain Procrustean level of captivation by what I was attempting to resist, i.e., suggesting the replacement of one dominant paradigm with another. My intention was to give voice to both sides in an attempt to shape my understanding of the situation. And as such, a wonderful discussion ensued.


Two stories

In an attempt to reframe the question of what entails a good education, I am reminded of two stories I heard as a child. Henny-Penny was pecking corn in the yard when something hit her on the head. She deduced that the sky was falling and being the good citizen that she was, she decided to run and tell the king. On her way she met up with several friends, shared her news, and together they raced to tell the king their finding. On their way to the king they ran across a fox who convinced them to take a short cut through his cave wherein all but Henny-Penny was killed.

Now Henny-Penny strikes me as a one without a very good education. Having a limited grasp of science, she leapt to conclusions without much evidence and thus was responsible for the death of several of her friends: the proverbial blind leading the blind model.

Following the avian meme, the story of the Little Red Hen takes a different tack. In this tale, Little Red Hen finds a grain of wheat while scratching in the field. She reckons that the grain should be planted and asks her barnyard mates, “who will plant the grain?” Her friends disavow themselves of any such responsibility and the hen plants the grain herself. The wheat grows, needs threshing and milling and the hen inquires of her friends who will help with said tasks. None of her friends are interested in helping her so she does it all herself. Finally, the hen bakes the flour into bread and asks her friends who would like to eat the lovely bread, wherein all her friends agree that they would love to; however, the hen denies them this opportunity and eats it all herself.

In this tale, the hen was educated enough to know the value of a grain of wheat. Rather than doing all the work and sharing with others, she decides to reap the rewards of her labor and coincidentally, teach her friends a “lesson.”

There are many lens’ by which both of these stories can be interpreted (politically, socially, economically, etc.) In many cases, if we consider our current state of public education, the sky is always falling, graduation rates are falling, test scores falling, etc. Perhaps it would be worth inquiring who is responsible for this news? What facts are being used to clearly determine that we are indeed in a crisis situation? Is it possible that reporters and researchers are generalizing about a large population (e.g., students) using insufficient samples? When in a crisis mode, we tend to react without putting much thought into the consequences of our actions a la Henny-Penny. For example, when a test designed to measure a child’s reading ability is used to measure a child’s reading ability, we have a sense that the results are helpful for both educators and the student. However,  when this same test is used to determine whether the same child should be retained or held back a year in school, that is an inappropriate use of the test (i.e., that isn’t what the test was designed to measure – whether the child was capable of  moving on to the next grade level). In other words, is the crisis in education a reality for all children or is situational, a result of bad planning and decision-making in a particular set of environments?

Similarly, the tale of the Little Red Hen reminds me of what happens when school districts, planners, and legislatures use information and research inappropriately.
 
The tale of the Little Red Hen also reminds me of educators who successfully integrate appropriate technologies into their classrooms. I have witnessed and heard tales of teachers working hard for their students, inspiring them in wholesale ways while their teammates, colleagues, and administration idly standby refusing to get involved, yet insist on taking credit for student success. Perhaps this is where the real crisis lies.

Henny-Penny and the Little Red Hen represent different ways to look at relationships and the affects they have on others. And like life, I believe it is safe to say that a good education is about relationships. Most educational crises are the result of poor political and economic decisions. Thus a good education is a matter of people caring enough to work in concert to support the appropriate needs of both individuals and society as a whole.

The models for accomplishing this task may differ. So I ask you: is it important that we all agree on a specific set of guidelines from which we can base our educational goals? The United Nations offers two such guidelines here and here.  Do these same types of guidelines need to be adopted by educators across the globe? Will this get most of us pointed in the right direction? What would the consequences be?

Perhaps this asking too much given free will; however your thoughts and comments are welcomed.

Electronic Frontier Foundation's Legal Guide for Bloggers --

A compilation of FAQs designed to inform you of your rights. As the site mentions, this guide is not a substitute for legal advice. Their goal is to provide a “roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger.”


Creative Commons’ Podcasting Legal Guide --

Creative Commons has recently published a "Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution," "a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting." The guide covers copyright, publicity rights, and trademark issues related to content that you acquire or create. Information is also provided on licensing your podcast. The Podcasting Tools site is also worth your time.

 

This comic provides an interesting take on the current debate regarding banning social networking sites in schools.

I believe this current debate represents the beginnings of the perfect storm for educational reform. Although the comic focuses on a poor application of technology in school, it hints at other pertinent issues such as plagiarism, test design, teacher preparation, study skills, time management, and social software affordances.

I wonder if my boss would prefer to determine my work status (keep or fire) based on a 50 minute multiple choice/short answer examination?

For me, the current DOPA debate feels like we, as a learning society, are in this Bardo state, this Kuhn-ian pergatory, somewhere between darkness and light in our overall perception of schooling and society. I find myself wondering how we are going to make this shift from seeing secondary schools as an assembly line to seeing them as network nodes in a connectivist ecology.

As David Byrne (1977) once said, They say that compassion is a virtue, but I don’t have the time….

After visiting my daughter’s student art show, I was amazed at what she and her peers were able to generate. Their forms and colors were full of life, filled with energy, and captured a genuine yearning for something greater. What makes their artwork all the more provocative is the environment from which it emanates. From primary school to undergraduate programs, students are more often delivered their education, where knowledge and information is crammed, somewhat absorbed, and mostly regurgitated on exam day.

Based on my experience of working in and with a variety of secondary schools, it seems many of them have lost sight of what education is about. Education is both about passing on what is known and inviting learners into the unknown in an effort to promote creativity and meaningful change.

Assuring continuity and fostering creativity and change are at once convergent and divergent. Both relate to knowledge and attitude, understanding and behavior, ways of thinking and seeing; they are the essence of teaching and learning. We desire creativity from students yet we want it to emerge from what is recognized and understood. We want continuity but when the results demonstrate a lack of ability to resolve problems or develop ways to improve our conditions, we feel betrayed.

A large part of the issue is how schools are designed. In most cases, schools are defined as delivery instruments and not as learning communities (or learning ecologies) where learning is not only the responsibility of students but also the teachers. Teacher colleges have made this all the more difficult by training educators to be delivery agents rather than provocateurs; mail carriers rather than artists or learning designers.

It is my contention that Internet technologies and social software offers/affords useful interventions. Education is not a location; it is an activity. Effectively integrating technology into learning systems is a complicated endeavor and connecting students to the Internet is not enough. Integration involves a rigorous and creative re-thinking, re-visioning, of educational objectives, a realistic understanding of the potential of collaborative technologies, coupled with an full understanding of the requisites involved with changing the dynamics of the educational system. Of these three concerns, acquiring the technology is probably the easiest part.

In meeting this challenge of potentiality and scale, I believe part of the solution resides in teacher empowerment. Teachers are the lynchpins of a free and democratic society; they have the power to turn learners on and off, the power to inspire and deny. Teachers are often underpaid and in many cases inadequately prepared, yet they are accountable for the successful teaching of the undernourished and the poorly prepared. Many educators work in schools that are ill-equipped, unhealthy, unsafe, and yet they are expected to understand and meet the needs of learners, parents, administrators, their community, and the economy. The Internet has ushered new possibilities in education, yet, at the same time, they have placed more demands on educators. Teachers are faced with computers in their classrooms, assisting learners in accessing, analyzing, and coping with the wide body of information available, as well as understanding how to use the available software and hardware to enhance teaching and learning.

A new model must emerge in teacher education that replaces training with lifelong development. Initial training in colleges and universities needs to focus not only on pedagogical, social, and organizational skills, it needs to couple these with an opportunity to explore the broader horizon of social software options.

Once teachers are employed and active within schools, time must be allowed for both structured and unstructured opportunities for training, upgrading, and acquiring new knowledge and skills. Professional development needs to become “part of the water,” and not an additional time-consuming burden. Recertification must be based on evidence and applications of additional training that can be clearly documented and school systems need to insure that teachers have a variety of options and opportunities to make this happen.

The question is not whether technology is effective in improving student achievement. What’s more important are the educational policies/strategies and the prerequisite conditions for using technologies in the classroom.

Integrating the Internet and social software into the classroom is a complex and multifaceted process. As we stand today, there is very little research regarding which technology is most appropriate and effective for particular tasks. In my mind, this is a good thing. This is where creativity steps in; this is what education is all about (i.e., trying out ideas, experimenting with software, making mistakes, reinventing, etc.). More importantly, effective and appropriate use involves the competent and committed involvement of people. To this end, I have found the blogosphere to be a rich and resourceful environment. Educators who use weblogs (aka edubloggers) regularly share their experiences, reflections, creations, and recommendations that are open to comments and further debate. In this regard, a community of practice and inquiry has emerged that offers a level of technical and social support on a global scale.

The challenge of implementing technology in the classroom is enormous and so are the potential benefits. The only real limits are the human imagination and creativity.

Jen Sorensen's latest book is Slowpoke America Gone Bonkers. She can be contacted through her website, slowpokecomics.com.

Is the U.S. becoming a police state? Here are the top 10 signs that it may well be the case.

 
A quick story: A martial arts student went to his teacher and said earnestly, "I am devoted to studying your martial system. How long will it take me to master it." The teacher's reply was casual, "Ten years." Impatiently, the student answered, "But I want to master it faster than that. I will work very hard. I will practice everyday, ten or more hours a day if I have to. How long will it take then?" The teacher thought for a moment, "20 years."

Changing the system

I have been and always will be an advocate for examining how we approach education, teaching, and learning. And I admit sometimes I feel a bit impatient at the rate of change I see happening.

I have been reading Emergence (2002) by Steven Johnson  where he makes several insightful points about the nature of evolution in self-evolving systems. In particular, I was struck by his analysis of harvester ant colonies and city sidewalks. Both emerge in relatively unpredictable and dynamic patterns and both evolve over time such that the developments that occur are relatively imperceptible to “those on the ground” or in the heat of the moment, so to speak.This concept provides me a bit of comfort in light of the events, controversies, and headlines that currently envelope the state of teaching and learning in the early 21st century. Yet taking comfort is no reason to stand on the sidelines waiting for changes to happen.

Engaged vs. enraged

Being the “driven” type of person that I am, I have decided to put my money where my mouth is and become more involved locally by hosting a series of workshops for practicing teachers where I introduce blogs, wikis, rss aggregators, flickr, podcasting, and show teachers how to join in on the fun. Until recently my concern, my hang-up, has been what real and lasting effect can I really provide? The last time I felt truly involved in my community was quitting my job as a graphic artist and becoming an English teacher in the local school system. In that case I found my idealism got the best of me and after three years I was completely burned out. I felt regret leaving the system and have been trying to figure out the best way to re-channel my energies and re-invent myself as an educator.

As I reflect on my days as a secondary school teacher, I remember the feeling of never having enough time to accomplish the goals I set for myself. I felt that the structure of the formal schooling system prevented the needed opportunities for self-exploration on learners and educators parts. Dividing the school day into a handful of periods and subjects seemed so antithetical to real learning. At the early primary level I watched kids’ days develop in a comfortable pattern where the lines between science, reading, recess, art, and naptime were all part of the learning cycle without calling particular attention to it in those terms. So what happened? When did we decide kids learn best by sitting still facing in the same direction focusing on a giant chalkboard?

That’s when I began to explore the idea of how computing might serve as a means of breaking down the classroom walls. I admit, I regularly want to disown the idea of using computers in formal schooling environments because (as Papert has noted many times) it is often poorly executed and done without much forethought (not to mention support issues, firewalls, and ignorance ranging far and wide). Yet, deep down, I know (wherein research proves as much) that they have a place in education and can be included in powerful and meaningful ways.

Subverting the system

One thing I learned from a war veteran friend of mine -- if you want to subvert the system, do it from within. Protesting the war by waving placards has some effect, but protesting the war by enlisting and laying down your arms or finding ways to derail the machine from within would seem a bit more effective (especially if it’s being done by scores of troops). As a classroom teacher, I felt I had a great opportunity to affect change in a hundred students a year. Now, after much reflection, I’ve decided to try to affect that same level of change in pre-service and practicing teachers, the lynchpins in the entire academic enterprise.

Teaching is a profession that often lends itself to those who want to save the world and make a positive difference. As a beginning teacher, a mentor once told me that if I try to impact all one hundred of my students I would probably feel overwhelmed, but if I tried to impact just five of those one hundred kids I would be doing myself and those five students a big favor. So until we can agree on systemic ways to make schools, teaching and learning more responsive to the individual and collective needs of each other and our communities, it makes sense that we do it one kid, one teacher at a time.

Shout out

Finally, I am grateful I discovered the edu-blogosphere and the many practitioners that share and reflect on a regular basis. It has been said that as a teacher, you are often alone with your students. Yet I have discovered a valuable community of educators that allow me to feel a part of a larger, worldwide community of artists, philosophers, and practitioners. I’ve probably learned more and made more meaningful connections/relationships online in the last six months than I did in the last four years of graduate school.

So for those of you who are as impatient as I am: The revolution is happening; it’s just right under our noses.


Reference:

Exploring Emergence