At the close of the Olympics, the chair of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), John Furlong highlighted the fact that Canadians were united in experiencing the 2010 Winter Olympic Games “I believe we Canadians tonight are stronger, more united, more in love with our country, and more connected with each other than ever before. These Olympic Games have lifted us up. That quiet, humble national pride we were sometimes reluctant to acknowledge seemed to take to the streets as the most beautiful kind of patriotism broke out all across our country."
I believe that modern communications technologies played a pivotal role in bringing us together for the past 17 days. If you were on Twitter during the Men's Hockey Championship, you felt it first hand. In today's podcast, I consider our evolving use of communications technologies as 'digital pheromones'.
Facing the realities of today's digital world, print journalism, music, and television are all evolving to meet the demands of their increasingly tech savvy audiences. Newspapers, musicians and media producers have all had to adapt to the social realities of a hyper-connected world.
Today's podcast considers how educators might similarly adapt, to ensure their own academic relevance. Real change begins through thoughtful conversations...
By now most people are very familiar with the way that metadata tags are "Teaching the Machine". What is less commonly understood, is how tags can be leveraged to engage students in "Teaching Themselves".
Assuming that a teacher can create a unique identifier for a class or course (i.e., Lucier_physics_2008 or LucierSPH08-unit5), there are many ways to engage your students in the gathering of teaching and learning resources.
1] Invite students to post and tag Flickr images that match with concepts taught in class. Students might also add comments to existing photos.
2] Encourage students to share bookmarks on Delicious, Diigo or Furl. Link to videos, blog posts, photos, songs...
3] Promote the use of reflective journals in the form of blog entries that use the course identifier as a keyword or tag.
4] Add comments to blog posts that include your course identifier. While linking to rich thinking, you can model how learners might participate in educational dialogue within the blogosphere.
5] Demonstrate how comments can be added to YouTube or TeacherTube videos. "This video would be great for my LucierSPH08 course!"
6] Set up a Custom Search Engine to search specific sites for course-matching content. Tag the best of the best with your course/class code.
7] Add custom sections to a personalized news page. Consider simplifying the process by sending the RSS feed to Google Reader or another aggregator.
8] Demonstrate how to search blog entries for topical materials. Send custom searches to your feed aggregator for filtering.
9] Tag selected educational and current events podcasts. Many post-secondary institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Penn State, Texas A&M, Duke, Queens, MIT offer access to lectures and other content. Consider subscribing to a few of the many terrific free podcasts available on iTunes. Shameless plug: Have you heard the Teacher 2.0 Podcast?
10] The advanced step: Set up live feeds to various content sources by aggregating tagged content to a community location by using a tool like PageFlakes or iGoogle.
Before launching such a social learning project with students, be sure to demonstrate the power of resource sharing by pre-tagging numerous resources specific to your course. A live demo using your course keyword should go a ways towards whetting the appetite of your students.
Who knows, by opening this conversation about sharing, you might even learn a few search tricks from your students! The video below by Jimmy Ruska, demonstrates what some students already know about effective searches for complimentary material, be it for music or university textbook content.
Eric Davidove's video has helped me to recognize many of my online colleagues as 'Superlearners'.
Teemu Arinasees the original concept of 'superlearning' as very much a one-way, school 1.0 phenomenon. In referring to the original concept, identified in the book by Ostrander and Schroeder "...superlearning as a concept is so school 1.0, where you acquire as much information as possible, so that you can reproduce it in various contexts…and bore yourself to death in the meantime."
But I see many elements of networked learning in this revised application of the word that applies directly to many of the learners in our classrooms today... teachers included!
Note: The original post has been edited based on information provided by Teemu Arina. As I can't seem to locate a strikethrough tool on Blogger, I've italicized the updated information. RL.
Alternate title: Twitter and Two Degrees of Separation... When working at the office, it's common practice that the most interesting things you learn in a day, are shared at the water cooler. It makes sense then to have a Web 2.0 water cooler, and I would suggest that the best such water cooler we have is Twitter. Note: This image is actually a flock of seagulls!
Social networking works at the water cooler, and it works on Twitter. Think about it... You find something worth sharing... you tweet; You begin work on a new project... you tweet; You're looking for assistance with a problem... you tweet.
The power of the 'Twittersphere' became real to me last evening around 8:00 p.m. when I was 'Uptoned'! It was noon in Australia, and our southern colleagues were just beginning to consider an invitation I'd left on Al Upton's 'Order for Closure' blog post (among what now sits at over 200 comments!). Until today, that was the only place I'd posted a link to a policy development wiki that might save other students from being denied the opportunity to write on the web.
With Al's catching up on the many responses to his blog post, he encountered my suggestion, and not knowing who I was, put out the call via Twitter . It turns out, that thanks to my mini-Twitter-network, I was only two degrees of separation from Al Upton!
The evidence: 1] 7:43 p.m. EST: Al tweeted from Adelaide "Does anyone know Rodd Lucier?". 2] 7:53 p.m. EST: Sue repeated the question from Perth... 3] 7:56 p.m. Cindy picked up the connection in Calgary and emailed me directly... 4] 8:03 p.m. My inbox rang with a message from Cindy 5] 8:12 p.m. Al and I began following one another on Twitter
Tweetscan helps to tell the time-stamped story: Twitter truly is an amazing tool for developing learning networks. The trouble is: I've now got a handful of 'twitter-mates' who will be at the water cooler while I'm sleeping!
The phenomenon that is 'social networking', is not what forward thinking educators are doing. Most young people using My Space, Twitter, and Facebook are doing so only to continue conversations held in the real world. Many of the wall-postings and text messages that form the backbone of social networks, are simply attempts to see what people are up to 'socially' rather than to engage in conversations that lead to knowledge creation.
Teacher 2.0 on the other hand, is beginning to create networks of like-minded educators intent upon learning from one another. These 'learning networks' consist similarly of information exchanges, with at least one major exception: these networks are sharing information on a range of topics of definable topics of interest to the collective.
If indeed the issue of our use of social tools is as important as Will Richardson suggests , then we need to do a better job of describing what we do! It's possible that an appropriate moniker might address some of the issues highlighted by Danah Boyd in 'The Economist' debate.
What shall we call it?
There are a number of related terms that would be more appropriate than 'social networks' to describe this type of collaborative learning: 'social learning’; or ‘learning networks’; or even ’social learning networks’, would be more appropriate terms. Any which way you slice it, the term 'learning', is conspicuous by its absence when one is describing the phenomenonal sharing taking place via blogs, wikis, tweets and other read/write tools.
Is it even new?
Building social learning networks is something many educators have done for years via email/webpal programs. (I remember doing such a program working with ten classrooms scattered across North America via a 1200 baud modem via AT&T around 1990.) The difference is that we now have access to tools that give us instant access not only to text, but to video and audio as well.
It’s too easy in using the term ’social networking’, to focus on the everyday social communication that young people participate in via Web 2.0 tools. Absent a true learning purpose, such communications are simply social dialogue. Learning networks are different, let's begin highlighting the uniqueness of our dialogue by including, even highlighting, the word learning.
"So, What is this 'social bookmarking' thing all about anyways?"
This quote is attributed to my youngest brother: a worldly-wize techno-whiz who has published in many formats, but who has yet to understand the power of bookmarking when paired with RSS subscriptions. If I can teach him about social bookmarking, then it stands to reason that there are many, many people (including the majority of educators?!) who have yet to discover the value of sites such as http://del.icio.us/
I sense a lesson coming on (with thanks to Common Craft)...
Social bookmarking is a practical educational tool that can be leveraged in a number of ways. So let me give you just a few reasons why you should be tagging sites:
1] Putting all of your bookmarks online and tagging them with keywords makes your favourites searchable.
2] You can access your bookmarks from any computer, using any browser... not just the one you have your 'favourites' on.
3] You can assess the popularity of any link you've bookmarked by taking note of the number of times a site has been saved by other del.icio.us users.
4] Your bookmarks are shareable by one simple URL. Friends, colleagues and students can visit your bookmarks by following a simple link. For example, my bookmarks are all online at http://del.icio.us/thecleversheep
5] Friends can choose to access only bookmarks tagged with specific keywords either by searching them, or by visiting sites by taglist like 'Web2.0' or 'photos'. Now that I think about it, that would be a good way to gather links for tagging on your own account. http://del.icio.us/thecleversheep/web2.0 http://del.icio.us/thecleversheep/photos
6] People can 'subscribe' to your bookmarks. By copying the RSS feed for a particular page within any users delicious bookmarks, you will be notified directly, any time a suitably tagged bookmark is added by that person. For example, if you want to be notified anytime Rodd Lucier finds a terrific video resource, you can copy the url: http://del.icio.us/thecleversheep/video into your RSS reader (Google Reader or Bloglines or Technorati...).
7] Teachers can invent unique tags for each of their classes using the subject or course code as a tag. Students could then access any site deemed worthy... anyplace, anytime! Tags for a grade 11 science course might be found in a place like this: http://del.icio.us/mrteacher/sci3u. Better yet, if a teacher shares a really unique tagging code like 'luciersci3u' then students could add bookmarks to their own del.icio.us accounts, and since you can search bookmarks by any and all users at once in the root of del.icio.us, students would be able to conveniently access the bookmarks made by any and all members of the class.
8] If some of these strategies are taught to students, either by example or by formally leading students to tag their own favourite websites, it won't take long for students to realize the potential of link-sharing. I can see students inventing tags like 'ancientegypt'or 'electionproject' in order to leverage the power of del.icio.us along with their peers.
Do you know of other practical applications? If so, feel free to add a comment. Maybe someone will bookmark this post on del.icio.us and we'll all be able to search this list of bookmark ideas amongst other 'cleversheep' tags! For more on this topic, check out the Podcast feed: "Teacher 2.0".
One autumn morning in 1999, I had the opportunity to attend a hands-on workshop to learn how to use Microsoft Office. I walked away learning only one new skill, but it has saved me innumerable frustrations with aligning text in a wide range of computer programs. The skill, was the soft return. You may already know that using the return/enter key, along with the shift key, ensures that text wraps onto the next line (as opposed to beginning a new paragraph), but you may be surprised at how many keyboarders are unaware of this command. That one tip, made the 90 minute workshop worthwhile for me. Since that day, I've used the 'soft return' as a gauge for the usefulness of a professional development workshop.
Uh Oh! Students are learning on their own every day! Whether learning to use MS Office, or producing content for a social networking site, independent learners often live in ignorance of their own learning gaps. Consider this fact amidst the reality that many young people are learning online skills before their teachers have even heard of the technologies, and we have a problem not easily rectified!
How can educators provide thoughtful advice to digital natives in this reality? We can't... Unless we get learning ourselves! Teachers need to experience the tools over time in order to understand their appeal, and to consider ways of harnessing these tools for educational purposes.
But first, what hurdles must be overcome? I can think of a few:
Hurdle #1: Training on the use of Web 2.0 tools, needs to be done in an environment that suits the 'linear brains' of experienced teachers.
Hurdle #2: Techno-literate teachers are hard to come by! With few educators (and fewer administrators?) having the skills to lead such training, it will be challenging to move forward.
Hurdle #3: Late to the party, teachers will struggle to gain the respect of more experienced students.
With support from Mike Wesch and his students at Kansas State University, consider this soft return on how writing is different in the world of the Web:
As a teacher; learner; consultant; speaker; and collaborator, I'm on the lookout for opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations with others who see themselves as learners. Professional development; project based learning; and Creative Commons are topics that are always on my radar.
At the close of the Olympics, the chair of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), John Furlong highlighted the fact that Canadians were united in experiencing the 2010 Winter Olympic Games
