Next Tuesday I am presenting to the AGM of CEGSA – Computers in Education Group, South Australia at the EDC in Hindmarsh. I’m thinking about confronting attendees with the harsh reality that we can never keep up with the new technologies kids are embracing and suggest a way forward that involves ‘Inverting the Paradigm’.
I just whizzed over to the CEGSA website to check date/time of the talk and notice that a title for the talk has already been published.
Mike Seyfang:- How Can 2 Work For You?
The net2blazers are planning to meet immediately after the AGM – I would like to enlist the help of anyone reading this post. I’m hoping for some conversation/feedback to help me shape my talk and I would like some online, real-time assistance from at least one live blogger (graham?), audience member (al?) and three or four twitter users (???).
For the content of the talk I was thinking along the lines of something I have been thinking about lately:
‘UncleMike’s excellent emerging technology excursion‘
or, for the academics
‘Inverting the paradigm – a model for dealing with increasing rate of growth in new tools and technologies students are using and bringing into schools‘
The basic idea is to demonstrate that no single educator could possibly keep up with all the technologies their students will be using and that no learning institution could implement a policy that would grant appropriate access to all such technologies. This is a symptom of what I like to call the ‘Blancmange Effect‘ – just when you think all the issues have been grasped, something unforseen emerges (try squeezing a flavoured jelly dessert in your hands and you will quickly get the idea). The point was driven home for me last week when discussing how I thought I had a solution for internet access from schools, the principal of my children’s school asked – what about access from mobile phones (and other wireless devices)!!
My basic thesis is to treat access to new technology services like going on an excursion – an idea inspired by Al Upton’s analogy of road safety to internet safety. Road traffic within school grounds is controlled more carefully than outside but we do, from time to time, take children on excursions – learning both skills like crossing roads safely and learning from the wonderful things that exist outside the school grounds. I would like to present a model where educators passionate about the potential of emerging technologies (e.g. social networking / web2 etc) assume that the default access to everything interesting is BLOCKED and that they develop and model lessons that take learners on ‘excursions’ into a totally OPEN internet, with a level of care and guidance commensurate with the age group involved.
I plan to present a scenario that might help spark some ideas around what one of these ‘excursions’ might be like. At this point I have a few bullet points rattling round my brain:
- Assume/ensure most of the interesting internet sites are BLOCKED at school
- Collect ‘consent forms’ from caregivers
- A topic of research (e.g. local historical figure(s)) is given from the curriculum
- Divide class into groups (library, computer room, field trip)
- Library: use books + computers with limited internet access to gather information
- Computer Room: has full OPEN internet access for the duraion of the supervised lesson, all net activity is logged (maybe even displayed on a screen at the front of the room)
- Field Trip: mobile phones are used to collect information (txt, photos, audio, video) which is sent to sites accessible from the computer room (e.g. flickr, youtube, blogs, twitter etc)
- Information collected is ‘synthesised’ into something like an internal school wiki or equivalent
Following an ‘excursion’ like this several interesting learning scenarios could be explored:
- Information literacy challenge – try and find some missing or inaccurate information about the topic of research in wikipedea
- Use a ‘screencast’ of the history of that wikipedia page to show the extent of misinformation in terms of time and volume
- Use the information collected in the first ‘excursion’ as a basis for an update to wikipedia
- Discuss any ‘risky’ behavior that was observed during the excursion with a view to developing safety strategies appropriate to the age group
- And many more…
If any of this sparks a response, please share it before next week. Over the weekend I plan to throw together a quick mash-up of screen recordings of some elements that invoke the most response, I may even script a live demo if there is sufficient demand / interest in these ideas.
This is one way I see ‘how (web) 2 can work for you‘ So, please, tell me what you think.
Fang – Mike Seyfang
http://www.cegsa.sa.edu.au/Events/AGM/default.asp
technorati tags:education, wikipedia, eduausem2007
Mike, this follows on brilliantly from some of the ideas uncovered at TALO Swapmeet – it’s one thing to whine about the filter but the virtual excursion concept where students could access the “interesting” tools with the structure in place you’d have for any off school site excursion is worth pursuing. Yep, I’ll live blog it as long as there’s some sort of open wireless point to connect to. I haven’t yet tried Twitter but you might struggle to find a volunteer, so I’ll create an account before next week and see what I make of it.
[...] As highlighted by one of Australia’s leading Social Networking thinkers in Education, Mike Seyfang, technology in schools is already in schools. Mobile phones, the MSN Messenger communities, blogs, Myspace, Wikipedia: these technologies are being used by students today. [...]
Good stuff – but the focus on SEARCH bothers me… It’s more about upload, isn’t it??
Rather than a topic focus (you suggested local figures) why not a mode focus: eg best on-use of images… the art of bricolage should be taught ahead of text generation, so that we get to know something of the range and repertoire available in collaging images: not as a software function but as a mode of creation of meanings. Ditto sound. Etc.
Information is just data Mike: you know that. Raw material. But ‘project’ is two words: a task as a noun, and a screening as a verb – let’s shift to the second.
Until we get media users thinking about the end possibilities for future users before the limitations of data, we don’t get new.
Brilliant as usual.
Two comments Mike. The first is that if you use scenarios then you should also draw out good examples of useful net behaviours (eg values, analysis, …) throughout the event as well as at the end such as ‘risky behaviour’ and secondly, I think that kids are further ahead than this vis a vis this weekend’s article about Kids and the Internet (Weekend Australian, 24-25th March, Magazine, p23). Kids today can handle loads of disparate facts but miss out on analysis and then finding the patterns and application.
How about multiple use of media (as you have) and multiple sources of information then cross checking information before drawing out the generalisations of what has been learnt and what appears to be accurate. Then to application about how best can we use this knowledge?
The final session needs to be stronger on drawing together some threads otherwise we fall into ‘smorgasborg’ learning of the type that is being criticised by Prof Susan Greenfield at Oxford. She says we skim across the top without learning anything. This is overcome by bringing the information together, analysing the patterns and then finding ways of using the newly acquired knowedge.
Perhaps then in your speech some indicators of how this could be done eg blogs, wikis etc
[...] Next week, the CEGSA AGM will have the pleasure of a presentation from Mike Seyfang (aka the Fang) which will hopefully provoke the assembled masses into some sort of reaction, be it excitement or fear (or maybe a heady mix of both). Mike is an independent consultant specialising in mashing Web2 technologies and because he doesn’t come from a classroom background and doesn’t fear sacred cows from that environment, is the ideal person to shake and challenge some conceptions and perceptions about the state of technology in education today. In collaborative fashion via his blog, his newly formed twitter account and the Net2Blazers email listserv, he’s circulating his embryonic idea for his little presentation and wants any input, regardless of whether you are a CEGSA member, or in this case a TGZ reader. [...]
[...] He showed a video mashup of an interview with Kevin Richardson with Nick Hodge where the point was made that the most interesting tools being used by kids are not accessible within the school environment. After a second blancmange video, he then outlined his vision of the “virtual fieldtrip or excursion”. He describes it best in his original post but he goes into further detail. The scenario described researching Wikipedia on Australian Governor Generals and getting students to spot errors in the content. [...]