Scott Crellin’s Edtec Blog

It became almost cliche.  Something that I heard so much that it began to be annoying, and I cringed at it the way I do when I hear some oldster say he enjoys ‘surfing’ the web.  Maybe others tired of hearing about it too.  The digital divide may not be getting the attention that it was ten or more years ago, but that does not mean it is no longer an issue.  Kathryn Montgomery points out in her book, “Generation Digital, ” that, “While public policies have helped ensure greater access through schools and libraries, they have not yet erased the troubling gap between children with access at home and those without it.”

I work in a school where I see this troubling gap each day.  About half of my students each year have access to the

internet and reliable computing technologies, while the other half remains without.  Most can’t even go to the library,

because that would require their parents to be available to take them instead of being at their second or third job.  Our school site makes an attempt, but its computer lab is under-utilized and the administration is married to a program that basically ammounts to digital test prep rather than any creative or interactive use of our machines.

But then I began to consider the bigger picture and what the digital divide means on a larger scale.  Turns out that as of 2005, the United States was number 11 on the list of most connected countries on the digital access index.  This article discusses efforts to increase the availability of computing technologies in places that are truly on the other side of the digital divide, like most of Sub-Saharan Africa.  As of the publishing of that article, only 3% of Africans had internet access.  Makes my complaints about 50% in my class sound like whining.

Some folks will say that the falling prices of computers and bandwidth will inevitably lead to technological equity.  However, many families in my district, across the country, and around the world have virtually no disposable income, and will continue to live on the non-digital side of the digital divide.

“We have to be where they are in this world.” Kathryn Montgomery quoted an anonymous company spokesperson speaking about social networking sites and blogs.  Generation Digital details the long history of the advertising and marketing industries’ web savvyness  in taking advantage of the youth presence on the internet that was ripe for the picking.  By the time social networking started to grow, industry had already been data mining and marketing to kids for years using sites that they created under the guise of education or entertainment.  With the growth of MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and other sites, new avenues were opening up to allow corporations to get their message to children and teenagers.  They were and are adept at using what has captured kids’ attention to their advantage.

social networking logos

I personally condemn much of what industry has done to take advantage of kids on the web, but at the same time, I have to admire their skill and guile.  Would that education had done or would do the same, but our school districts are so afraid of the potential dangers of students running into anything inappropriate, that they restrict the very thing that could help to engage and motivate students.  The advertisers and marketers know that they “have to be where they are,” I wonder why my district and school administrators don’t see the value of education having a presence where the students are online.  My district continues to block far too many valuable online applications, and advocating the use of computer software that is dry and boring, and resembles nothing more than electronic test prep.

Useful applications are in wide use in higher ed.  Blackboard, Moodle, and other learning management systems could offer much to primary and secondary education, not to mention sites like Ning,  Wikispaces, and others.  One of the classes that I am currently enrolled in in my Masters program at SDSU uses a Ning site as a hub for much of the learning that takes place in the course.  Discussion boards, assignments, a syllabus, and a space to organize and communicate in collaborative groups are just some of what the Ning site offers.  Many others have done so as well, though they remain a rarity among teachers I meet in my district.   I use Facebook, but not MySpace or others like it, and I can see potential for learning in the sharing and social groups that occur there.  Sure, my friends share all kinds of useless information and annoying applications with me.  I’m not particularly fond of being hit with virtual pillows or being recruited for battle in mob wars, but I have also learned quite a bit from useful links and groups that I come across from time to time.

It seems that throughout the history of media, education has lagged behind industry in taking advantage of  new media.  Radio, TV, and now the web.  We need to be where they are, so we can get them where we want them to be.

Generation Digital Cover Art

Kathryn C. Montgomery’s book about the issues surrounding children growing up immersed in digital media highlights the recent history surrounding the advent of the internet during the last 10 to 15 years.  Among the many concerns that Montgomery reveals in her book is that of children and privacy issues.  Privacy on the internet has been a serious issue since its inception, and will likely continue to be so into the foreseeable future.  Two things that came as a surprise to me in reading this book were the blatant way that corporations began targeting children with advertising and data collection, and how passive the government was in letting industry go unregulated for so long.

I found it astounding to learn that there were sites created to collect data from children that were being billed as educational sites and being promoted by school districts and teacher organizations.  I began using the internet in the 90s when these things were happening, but, not being a child at the time, or having children yet, I have no recollection of such sites.  I find it hard to imagine it happening today when my kids go onto sites that have games for kids.  I can’t remember seeing a single one that asked my kids for any information at all, and the idea of them supplying such facts as our address, or income, or such things, I find horrifying.  It also highlights how little parents at the time knew what their kids were doing on the internet.  Whether or not the trend has changed and parents are more aware these days is hard to say.  They certainly have fewer excuses for not knowing what their kids are doing, given these days it would be hard to remain unaware that there could be harmful content on the internet these days.

Equally surprising to me as I read was that, in the face of such an obvious problem, the Clinton administration and congress suggested that industry self-regulate.  To suggest to corporations that they come up with their own set of rules for how they should be allowed to collect data on the internet is like me telling my kids that they should decide how they should what chores they should have to do each day, and by what time the should be done.  Of course they’re going to drag their heels.  They have no incentive to make any changes.  As long as things stayed the same, they would continue to benefit, and the consequences for not making changes basically just amount to a meaningless reprimand.

Happily, things have changed considerably since those days, as is evidenced by a variety of sites that my children use that do not gather data or advertise in such a predatory manner.  Unfortunately, as I learned from such sites as privacy.org and privacyrights.org, the battle for an internet free of data collection and intrusive practices is not going to happen soon.  Anyone with an email account knows that spam can find you despite your best efforts to filter it, and at this point, best we can do is  learn to deal it.

In general, what I love the most about Instructional Design is the actual nuts and bolts of putting a project together.  In the ADDIE model, that would be the Design and Development phases.  Specifically, I love the concepts of Flow, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and the ARCS model for motivation.  I love the simplicity and common sense approach  to design of Cognitve Load Theory, and the utility and practicality of the Knowledge Management in supplementing instruction.  In the fast-changing world of ID and education in general, nothing stays the same very long.  Technology changes, demographics change, and theories develop and moprh into something new.  Some of my loves may be much different different in the future, but I think their essence will remain the same.

I cannot really see the need for motivting learners changing much as time goes by, the change will simply be in how we do it.  Instructional Designers will certainly want the recipients of the work to attain a state of flow, and I think it will become easier with the advent of new technologies to customize the difficulty of tasks to the exact level needed by an individual learner.  This will certainly facilitate flow.  Keller’s ARCS model will also likely remain untouched.  We will still need to gain the learner’s attention, establish relevance, build confidence, and provide a level of satisfaction to the learner when the task is complete.  The differences may lie in precisely what the learner finds interesting, relevant, confidence-building, and satisfying.  Motivation has always been essential to good ID, and will likely remain so even as other instructional methods change.

Cognitive Load Theory is one that was proposed and then refined by research.  Many studies were done highlighting the differences between learning in situations where the material was presented in different ways.  It is also based on what we know about how the brain works.  We are only able to focus our attention on so much before our capacity to learn and retain ideas is diminished.  This is another theory that promises to be important as time goes by, but one in which there is likely room for continuous refinement.  As our knowledge of the way our brains work becomes more complete, there will likely be implications for how we present lessons to maximize efficiency, and therefore we will have improvements in Cognitive Load Theory.

My final choice for ID loves, was Knowledge Management.  In a world of ever increasing data availability, KM promises to be come increasingly important.  In my classroom alone, I am awash in student data that I seldom have the time to analyze sufficiently.  The best use of assessment information, after all, is to inform instruction.  But, too often, it only becomes a mark on a report card.  Systems for organizing and analyzing classroom data do exist, but need to become more widespread (i.e. I have them in my classroom) in the schools of the future.  Knowledge management is also a critical at the organization level.  One of my projects in the EDTEC program attempts to address this issue by gathering math resource support and making it available to teachers on the web.  I love the idea that with KM we can tap into what each person in an organization knows and make that available to those who need the data.

Like Flow, ARCS, and Cognitive Load theory, it is likely that much of ID will remain mostly the same, with maybe a few minor adjustments.  Other systems have great potential for growth due to the advancement of technologies, such as KM.  The future of ID no doubt holds much which is yet to be revealed, but after consulting my magic eight ball, I am confident in making this announcement:

After watching Pay Attention and A Vision of K-12 Students Today, I first had to wipe away the tear that was dripping down my cheek (I’m a sucker for those poor sad-eyed students holding the messages their teacher wrote), then I was able to stop and consider the message and how it relates to my teaching practice.  I was thinking about the possibilities that could be unleashed in my classroom if I began to encourage texting rather than suppressing it.  Ironically, before I began to consider too deeply, I found myself back on Yahoo’s home page faced with this little gem about a teenage girl who won $50,000 dollars as a result of her texting skills.  So, I am convinced.  Let them text! It is not likely to be harmful to students’ writing skills, but rather, the practice will help develop them.  Texting can also increase collaboration, support good study habits, and encourage contributions to class discussions that otherwise might be lost.

I admit I was one of those teachers who feared that my students’ texting abreviation habits would interfere with the way they wrote formal papers as well, but according to linguist David Crystal in an interview with Good blogger, Mark Peters, the majority of texts don’t really include abbreviations, and those who do use them are perfectly capable of knowing when not to use them.  I have only seen a few in the written work of my students, and even those only required a reminder that formal writing shouldn’t include text speak to set them straight.  In a similar way, it used to irritate me the way the R in Toys ‘R Us is backward, and that Rite-Aid incorrectly spells the word ‘right’.  But, as these examples haven’t led to widespread deterioration of the English language, I don’t suppose I should worry that texting will either.

In his Suite101 article, Tom Wolsey mentions that students could participate in classroom discussions by texting rather than by raising their hands, thereby deepening the classroom conversation.  A strange idea at first, but do I not actively listen to my professors in online courses while following the text chat of my classmates? (And listening to an internet radio station, answering emails, ….)  Why didn’t I recognize this before?  Of course not all of the texts will be on topic, and some will probably be less than flattering comments about me, their teacher, but I think I’d rather the insulting notes were digital ones that I never see, than the paper ones that I pick up off the floor later and then spend too much time trying to identify the handwriting.

Texting could also be used outside of the classroom to supplement learning inside the classroom.  In Distributed Learning and the Field of Instructional Design, Dempsey and Van Eck define distributed learning as, “Any eductational or training experience that uses a variety of means, including technology, to enable learning.”  It goes beyond online learning, which is bound to the internet, to include just about any technology that enhances learning.  Students could text each other or me with a response to something they read for homework.  They could publish to a class blog via text.  In this way, text messaging becomes an asynchronous (not taking place in real time) component of learning.

Finally, back to that champion texting teen that led me down this road.  How does she use texting to support her learning?  She uses text messages while, “studying for exams with friends, which she says is better done by text because she can look back at the messages to review.”  So there you have it.  Let them text.

Change is inevitable in education as it is in the general world at large, and our schools’ successes will be defined by how we respond to change.  As our world’s economy, political and social environment, our nation’s role, our technological capabilities, and many other factors continue to change, our educational system will need to change in order to ensure our students’ ability to succeed in this new environment.  Further, pressure on school districts to demonstrate accountability and continuous academic improvement has been heightened by the No Child Left Behind Act.

According to Reigeluth and Duffy in Trends and Issues in P-12 Educational Change “piecemeal change is inadequate” in meeting the needs of our districts to meet the challenges that they face.  Changing one component of a system while leaving the rest of the structure alone is unlikely to effect the necessary improvements.  Additionally, it is possible that such piecemeal changes might be incompatible with the system as a whole, causing disfunction and a likely reversion to the previous state of affairs.

The kind of systemic change that Reigeluth and Duffy advocate most strongly for is “ecological” systemic change.  This model argues that there is a larger systemic environment in which a hierarchy of subsystems operate, and which all must be aligned toward a common goal from the top down.  They go on to describe methods for effecting such change.

I found it particularly interesting to note in this chapter that my district, Chula Vista Elementary School District, is listed among those on the learningfirst website as having effected such a redesign.  The system change, having occurred before my employment in the district, and after my time as a student in the district, escaped my detection until I learned of it in this chapter.  I do, however, see some of its legacy still in effect, including a focus on professional development, and teacher support.  The site-based decision making touted by the article as part of CVESD’s model, I am sad to say, seems to have fallen by the wayside.  Perhaps my district has failed in its upkeep of the systemic change model, including use of the feedback loop depicted in figure 21.2 of the Trends chapter.

As a classroom teacher in an elementary school I have seen quite a few trends or phases in my short time in the field.  It sometimes seems like every year I’m attending trainings and workshops on some new instructional method or another.  These methods, though, tend to fall under the umbrella of a broader theory, such as cognitivism or constructivism.  A more general trend, in which I see potential for future research and development is in the type of individualized instruction and the increased potential for collaboration that is likely to become widely available as technology continues its rapid pace of progression.

Already, many districts and schools are implementing computerized intervention software that continually customizes itself to the user based on the quality of their responses.  Most of these programs are simply a series of questions that the software provides to the learner at their level with little instruction provided to the user.  As technology continues to improve I’m confident that these programs will begin to provide more support and actual instruction to go with the repeated quizzing that they already do.  I’m not suggesting by any means that these programs are a replacement for teachers; instructional theorists, researchers, and designers will likely be there to design and test methods for effectively using these new tools in our classrooms.

The Web 2.0 movement also continues to progress.  It is impossible to me that our elementary and secondary schools can continue to do so little to integrate these valuable tools into their instructional programs.  There are schools and classes that are doing good things with wikis, blogs, and other tools, and this is where researchers will gather data to inform the future of mainstream instructional theory.  By mainstream, I mean the kind of theory and research that my superintendent reads and buys into.

Technology will help our students to collaborate and learn together and it can help us customize and individualize instruction, but theory and research need to be there to guide teachers and help them to develop the best practices they need to have to be most effective.

A link to the screencast of my presentation.

Thanks!

Evaluation

• How will you know if this site is helping your users reach the objectives you’ve defined for them?

I will have several methods of verifying that my students have met the objectives for this unit of study.  The contributions of each group to the wiki can be evaluated on how well they meet the state standards.  They will be evaluated according to how well they organize and present their information as well as how well they meet writing standards.  I will track the contributions of individual students to their pages by using the page history feature of the wiki, as well as asking each student to describe their contributions to their page in the discussion forum (thanks for that idea, Karl).

The students will also be asked to respond to the work of different groups, answering questions about the content of the pages as well as providing feedback to other groups.  In this way, I hope to ensure that the students will read and learn from each others’ work.  I have not added instructions for this part of the wiki assignment to the wiki space yet because the response that each student will make to another group will be dependent on that group’s as yet unposted work.  I am also toying with the idea of asking each group to come up with a set of questions that another student should be able to answer as a result of studying their page instead of actually creating the questions myself.  I hope to see evidence that each student is collaborating to construct their own learning as well as learning from the work of their peers.

The final method of evaluation for this project will be a written test that I use every year.  I hope to see better results from this year’s class as a result of their collaboration on the wiki project.

Implementation

• How will you introduce this to the class?
• What do you have to do to get permission from the powers-that-be at your school?

This first one is a very good question.  We are fortunate enough to have LCD projectors in our rooms, though, so walking the class through how to use a wiki shouldn’t be too difficult.  I plan to wait until we have done a few days worth of lessons introducing Egypt to the class before showing them the site.  As we go through our Egypt unit (usually about 3 weeks long), we will be taking periodic trips to the computer lab where the class will be able to interact with the site.  I’ll have them work in their small groups on individual pages, since each student can’t edit at the same time.  Eight different groups of 3 to 4 students can edit eight different pages, though.  Much of the composition of the pages will have to be done in class with paper and pencil, as their total computer time is going to be limited.  We will probably only get into the lab 3 or 4 times during the unit, and may have to extend our time working on the wiki into the next social studies unit.  Students will also be invited to work on it from home if they wish.

I have thought quite a bit about how I will get permission at my school.  I don’t think it will be too tough to get principal approval, the challenge will be locating the correct person at my district to unblock the required sites.  I don’t want to go too high up the administrator chain because I’ll probably run into roadblocks, but if I find the right person with the technical ability who won’t have any irrational fears associated with internet use for students, it might end up being easy.  I’m just hoping that I will just be able to send an email or make a phone call to get it to happen, and I won’t have to write up any reports or fill out paperwork to make it happen.  There are several other applications I’d like to be able to work with in my classroom might require the same sort of procedure, so I am really hoping it won’t be too difficult.