Also published on the Educational Technology and Change Journal
You can read a lot about the threat of new media to literacy and the printed word. Harold Jarche blog post Literacies is an example. Often there is a link made between an ability to engage in deep and meaningful understanding and learning and reading large bodies of text. Or rather, a link between an inability to do this with the fast-pace of linking between different media in the Web 2.0 world. Well, I just don't buy this. In fact it's rubbish.
Firstly, literate doesn't just mean reading large bodies of text, you can be literate in a number of diffrerent communication tools. Not just the one that dominated by necessity being the only means of mass media distribution available for a while. Now the oral tradition is making a comeback and I have no real problem with that. It's the way it was done before books were on the scene and its still the dominant way in many non-western societies who can now take advantage of what's on offer. Also, text literacy isn't threatened by social media it's enhanced by it. Facebook and messaging forced teenagers to use words and sentences for their communication where previously it was only speaking (I never wrote a letter to a friend when I was a teenager). Ok, it's short but what the matter with that. I'm more in line with Negroponte on this issue. He says:
"Reading and writing are going to be around forever. The word is not going to go away and collecting words into bodies of thought is not going to go away." and
"There is no question that words are powerful, that they always have been and always will be … But just as we seldom carve words in rocks these days, we will probably not print many of them on paper for binding tomorrow."
Let's not confuse reading with publishing. Publishers want reading to be synonymous with books. But it doesn't have to be this way and it really isn't now.
The ability to quickly reference, aggregation, annotate and manipulate text is a massive, massive plus for learning and understanding. It can be done and was done in the old way but not by nearly enough as we'd care to admit to ourselves. Often the book champions are avid readers. What about those that don't read much. Surely, engaging in social media is plus for them. There exposure to words goes up drastically. Now the conditions for learning (admittedly only in computer rich societies) are far more desirable. Thinking about how I learn, I like printing and noting, but I also like RSS, online note-taking, bookmarking, and blogging. There things are fundamental. These things facilitate my learning and democratise it for all. The single biggest factor in helping the quality of my literacy is this blog (please don't comment on my grammar, it's improved a lot)!
The biggest barrier to this is learning how to learn this way and an obstacle in the way of this is the negative light social media is painted in.
News analysis, features, special reports about emerging technologies and their impact for innovators and business leaders.
Ebook readers/Ipad for education?
Also published on the Educational Technology and Change Journal
I'm doing a project on Ebook readers at the moment and it's led me to follow closely the advent of the iPad and the ebook reader developments. My interest is the potential impact on education. At the moment, the contest is in the commercial/entertainment market. Once things settle down education will be looked at. From what I've been studying, you can't just give students and educators an ebook reader as it is right now and expect it to transfer across to education successfully. Looking at it just from a book replication point of view it has to, at least, perform the tasks students need from any text well and efficiently. Principle amongst these is taking notes and flicking back and forth through the pages. It seems that, at the moment, Kindle and co. don't do the annotation and navigation well enough for the devices to sell themselves in an educational context. This is crucial because, for learning, you have to be able to personalise the resource in some way and, for the classic textbook, this is done by scribbling in the margin, underlining, highlighting. A recent pilot programme using ebook readers showing these issues is discussed in the article Highlighting E-Readers by Steve Kolowich.
Alongside this, you have the easy sell of the storage saving and long term cost saving together with the environmental plus point. This last issue is a complicated one but I come down on the plus side largely because of the article Ebook readers greener than books, study says by Martin LaMonica. However, I've heard some awful things about the black market that exists around the disposal of old hardware.
When the time comes for educational use, the selling point be with the textbook. The classic ebook reader will not challenge the didactic pedagogy and therefore has a chance of success - as long as it can be seen to do what is done already better. The biggest obstacle in the way of this will be publishers jockeying for position to control this market. It's annoying but inevitable.
Now to the ipad. One impact will be making Kindle look horribly out of date. Even though they are not doing exactly the same things, they look and seem comparable and the ebook reader pales by comparison. I suggest Kindle sorts out it's web browsing and lack of colour pretty damn quickly! Looking out of date shouldn't matter, but this is always a valid bullet point when you approach the whole issue of e-learning and "connecting with the kids." Still this is the important point. What's important is the impact it will have on mobile learning in general. Yes, e-reading can occur, but being a suitable, valid, legitimate devices to house to house mobile learning could be its biggest legacy. It's far too early to say but my instinct tell me so.
When it comes to pedagogy, whereas the ebook reader will reinforced the didactic, the ipad would challenge it by offering such a vast array of features and media options any educator who teaches with one would be foolish not to explore what's available.
Now I know none of this will happen any time soon. But the potential is there. Having said that the potential is there to do a lot of things with technology and it doesn't happen, but you know that right.
I'm doing a project on Ebook readers at the moment and it's led me to follow closely the advent of the iPad and the ebook reader developments. My interest is the potential impact on education. At the moment, the contest is in the commercial/entertainment market. Once things settle down education will be looked at. From what I've been studying, you can't just give students and educators an ebook reader as it is right now and expect it to transfer across to education successfully. Looking at it just from a book replication point of view it has to, at least, perform the tasks students need from any text well and efficiently. Principle amongst these is taking notes and flicking back and forth through the pages. It seems that, at the moment, Kindle and co. don't do the annotation and navigation well enough for the devices to sell themselves in an educational context. This is crucial because, for learning, you have to be able to personalise the resource in some way and, for the classic textbook, this is done by scribbling in the margin, underlining, highlighting. A recent pilot programme using ebook readers showing these issues is discussed in the article Highlighting E-Readers by Steve Kolowich.
Alongside this, you have the easy sell of the storage saving and long term cost saving together with the environmental plus point. This last issue is a complicated one but I come down on the plus side largely because of the article Ebook readers greener than books, study says by Martin LaMonica. However, I've heard some awful things about the black market that exists around the disposal of old hardware.
When the time comes for educational use, the selling point be with the textbook. The classic ebook reader will not challenge the didactic pedagogy and therefore has a chance of success - as long as it can be seen to do what is done already better. The biggest obstacle in the way of this will be publishers jockeying for position to control this market. It's annoying but inevitable.
Now to the ipad. One impact will be making Kindle look horribly out of date. Even though they are not doing exactly the same things, they look and seem comparable and the ebook reader pales by comparison. I suggest Kindle sorts out it's web browsing and lack of colour pretty damn quickly! Looking out of date shouldn't matter, but this is always a valid bullet point when you approach the whole issue of e-learning and "connecting with the kids." Still this is the important point. What's important is the impact it will have on mobile learning in general. Yes, e-reading can occur, but being a suitable, valid, legitimate devices to house to house mobile learning could be its biggest legacy. It's far too early to say but my instinct tell me so.
When it comes to pedagogy, whereas the ebook reader will reinforced the didactic, the ipad would challenge it by offering such a vast array of features and media options any educator who teaches with one would be foolish not to explore what's available.
Now I know none of this will happen any time soon. But the potential is there. Having said that the potential is there to do a lot of things with technology and it doesn't happen, but you know that right.
New Personal Knowledge Management
I've been reading a lot about Personal Knowledge Management and Personal Learning Environments recently and I've recently made some changes to my PKM which I thought I'd share in this space.
Previously, I learnt mostly from reading the blogs. I tagged them in google reader for reference and, every do often, I would blog myself here to reflect on what I was learning. This has worked fine but there are two things which I'm not happy about:
- I've found my blogging to be a little sporadic and random at times.
- Tagging doesn't often result in much reference afterwards
A few weeks ago I discovered the awesome highlighter. Immediately, I incorporated this into my daily practice. Now, as well as tagging in google reader, if I read something I like I use the awesome highlighter to highlight the best bits. Then, every few days, I revisit what I've highlighted and tweet the best bits. I can tag things as well which is useful. This is a whole extra layer of reviewing and sharing. A whole extra layer of learning which didn't previously exist. The final stage is the blogging. My plan is to blog about what I was tweeting now that I am doing this regularly. I feel that there will be value in looking at my twitter stream and reflect on themes or key tweets. As I haven't done this, I can't say for certain how valuable this will be. However, if I can do this regularly then my blogging will also become more regular.
What's been excellent so far has been the ability to mine the best bits of the blog posts I read. Usually, there is a sentence or a phrase that really sticks out. Now through highlighting and twitter I am able get right to these gems - regularly.
If you have been here before and find value in reading this blog, I would suggest you follow my twitter account - TomPreskett.
Previously, I learnt mostly from reading the blogs. I tagged them in google reader for reference and, every do often, I would blog myself here to reflect on what I was learning. This has worked fine but there are two things which I'm not happy about:
- I've found my blogging to be a little sporadic and random at times.
- Tagging doesn't often result in much reference afterwards
A few weeks ago I discovered the awesome highlighter. Immediately, I incorporated this into my daily practice. Now, as well as tagging in google reader, if I read something I like I use the awesome highlighter to highlight the best bits. Then, every few days, I revisit what I've highlighted and tweet the best bits. I can tag things as well which is useful. This is a whole extra layer of reviewing and sharing. A whole extra layer of learning which didn't previously exist. The final stage is the blogging. My plan is to blog about what I was tweeting now that I am doing this regularly. I feel that there will be value in looking at my twitter stream and reflect on themes or key tweets. As I haven't done this, I can't say for certain how valuable this will be. However, if I can do this regularly then my blogging will also become more regular.
What's been excellent so far has been the ability to mine the best bits of the blog posts I read. Usually, there is a sentence or a phrase that really sticks out. Now through highlighting and twitter I am able get right to these gems - regularly.
If you have been here before and find value in reading this blog, I would suggest you follow my twitter account - TomPreskett.
Real Openness
I took a lot from David Wiley's post on Openness. He outlines what openness represents at the moment and where it should be:
For over a decade, openness in education has been an adjective describing educational artifacts.
Open content, open educational resources, open courseware, and open textbooks all mean teaching materials that are shared with everyone, for free, with permission to engage in the 4R activities.
The 4Rs are reuse, redistribute, revise, remix. Openness is about overcoming your inner two-year-old who constantly screams, “Mine! Openness reminds us of what we knew intuitively before society gave us permission to act monstrously toward one another.
What is the appropriate role of openness in education?
The question is deeply insidious. The question implies that openness might play any of several roles in the educational enterprise. The question distracts people from seeing that openness is the sole means by which education is affected, and that education is inherently an enterprise of generosity, sharing, and giving.
we see technology being turned against it potential and made to conceal and withhold. For example, a course management system like Blackboard theoretically has the potential to greatly improve educators’ capacity to share. But instead CMSs takes the approach of hiding educational materials behind passwords and regularly deleting all the student-contributed content in a course. If Facebook worked like Blackboard, every 15 weeks it would delete all your friends, delete all your photographs, unsubscribe you from all your groups, etc.
Education finds itself using radical new technology in backwards ways, reinforcing those outdated ways of thinking with law and institutional policy, and unable to satisfy rapidly increasing popular demand.
Education has to some degree lost its way; forgotten its identity. We’ve allowed ourselves and our institutions to be led away from our core value of openness – away from generosity, sharing, and giving, and toward selfishness, concealment, and withholding. To the degree that we have deserted openness, learning has suffered.
The spirit of teaching is openness; sharing your knowledge, guiding the learner and hopefully teaching how to be a good learner. But we made learning a commodity; something that can be packages and sold. This is actually one big trick. Learning can be done by anyone at any time and now this is easier than ever before. The threat to formal education is this packaged, controlled, guarded and expensive world is being challenged by the very notion teaching was founded on - openness and the instinct to share. If institutions continue to scream "Mine!" Then, ultimately they will suffer.
For over a decade, openness in education has been an adjective describing educational artifacts.
Open content, open educational resources, open courseware, and open textbooks all mean teaching materials that are shared with everyone, for free, with permission to engage in the 4R activities.
The 4Rs are reuse, redistribute, revise, remix. Openness is about overcoming your inner two-year-old who constantly screams, “Mine! Openness reminds us of what we knew intuitively before society gave us permission to act monstrously toward one another.
What is the appropriate role of openness in education?
The question is deeply insidious. The question implies that openness might play any of several roles in the educational enterprise. The question distracts people from seeing that openness is the sole means by which education is affected, and that education is inherently an enterprise of generosity, sharing, and giving.
we see technology being turned against it potential and made to conceal and withhold. For example, a course management system like Blackboard theoretically has the potential to greatly improve educators’ capacity to share. But instead CMSs takes the approach of hiding educational materials behind passwords and regularly deleting all the student-contributed content in a course. If Facebook worked like Blackboard, every 15 weeks it would delete all your friends, delete all your photographs, unsubscribe you from all your groups, etc.
Education finds itself using radical new technology in backwards ways, reinforcing those outdated ways of thinking with law and institutional policy, and unable to satisfy rapidly increasing popular demand.
Education has to some degree lost its way; forgotten its identity. We’ve allowed ourselves and our institutions to be led away from our core value of openness – away from generosity, sharing, and giving, and toward selfishness, concealment, and withholding. To the degree that we have deserted openness, learning has suffered.
The spirit of teaching is openness; sharing your knowledge, guiding the learner and hopefully teaching how to be a good learner. But we made learning a commodity; something that can be packages and sold. This is actually one big trick. Learning can be done by anyone at any time and now this is easier than ever before. The threat to formal education is this packaged, controlled, guarded and expensive world is being challenged by the very notion teaching was founded on - openness and the instinct to share. If institutions continue to scream "Mine!" Then, ultimately they will suffer.
Brain changing technology
I found some interesting quotes about the impact of digital media on our brains. Oppenheimer paints a negative picture:
My concern with this digital media is that it’s such short attention span stuff that they get bored. It’s what I call instant gratification education, a thought comes to you, you pursue it, you see a web site you click on it. You want to hear music while your studying you do it. All this bifurcates the brain and keeps it from pursuing one linear thought and teaches you that you should be able to have every urge answered the minute the urge occurs (Todd Oppenheimer, Author, The Flickering Mind).
I don't see it like this at all. Having lines of thought answered or satisfied instantly is a good thing. We'd have always done this if it were possible. And why is linear necessarily good. Life isn't linear, life is complex and every-changing. The learner needs to learn this way and cope with it. Why learn for a world that doesn't exist. I don't see this as a barrier to deep and meaningful thinking. On the contrary, we now have better tools to do the job properly.
So I prefer this quote:
There was always gains and losses … when print replaced aural culture, when writing happened there was certainly things we lost, one of them was memory. You think of the Homeric poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Homeric singers could produce thousands of lines of poetry out of their own memory. We’re not good at that any more because print took it away. Is it a loss? Sure. And to a certain extend getting people to be contemplative and a little bit slower; not to multi-task all of the time, paying avid attention over a long period of time to a certain extend might be lost. But that’s the price of gain. (James Paul Gee, Arizona State University)
Sure, I'd like a better memory and if we are naturally less adapt at this then it's a shame. But memory can be improved if you really want to. The important different is that we have greater opportunities to realise different pedagogies in an increasing number of ways. We are changing who we are for the better. Interestingly, the aural culture which was replaced by printing can now make a resurgence thanks to the ease with which podcasting/videoing can be done.
The point is that this is a problem that we as human beings have coped with throughout most of the 20th century and into the 21st century and the good news is we survived it. As a culture we learned how to adapt to it … so we are seeing this period of evolution and at the end of the day we’re better off as a society if we go at this with a sense of open mindedness and exploration. (Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California)
This is spot on - open mindedness and exploration.
My concern with this digital media is that it’s such short attention span stuff that they get bored. It’s what I call instant gratification education, a thought comes to you, you pursue it, you see a web site you click on it. You want to hear music while your studying you do it. All this bifurcates the brain and keeps it from pursuing one linear thought and teaches you that you should be able to have every urge answered the minute the urge occurs (Todd Oppenheimer, Author, The Flickering Mind).
I don't see it like this at all. Having lines of thought answered or satisfied instantly is a good thing. We'd have always done this if it were possible. And why is linear necessarily good. Life isn't linear, life is complex and every-changing. The learner needs to learn this way and cope with it. Why learn for a world that doesn't exist. I don't see this as a barrier to deep and meaningful thinking. On the contrary, we now have better tools to do the job properly.
So I prefer this quote:
There was always gains and losses … when print replaced aural culture, when writing happened there was certainly things we lost, one of them was memory. You think of the Homeric poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Homeric singers could produce thousands of lines of poetry out of their own memory. We’re not good at that any more because print took it away. Is it a loss? Sure. And to a certain extend getting people to be contemplative and a little bit slower; not to multi-task all of the time, paying avid attention over a long period of time to a certain extend might be lost. But that’s the price of gain. (James Paul Gee, Arizona State University)
Sure, I'd like a better memory and if we are naturally less adapt at this then it's a shame. But memory can be improved if you really want to. The important different is that we have greater opportunities to realise different pedagogies in an increasing number of ways. We are changing who we are for the better. Interestingly, the aural culture which was replaced by printing can now make a resurgence thanks to the ease with which podcasting/videoing can be done.
The point is that this is a problem that we as human beings have coped with throughout most of the 20th century and into the 21st century and the good news is we survived it. As a culture we learned how to adapt to it … so we are seeing this period of evolution and at the end of the day we’re better off as a society if we go at this with a sense of open mindedness and exploration. (Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California)
This is spot on - open mindedness and exploration.
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