Social Change | Betchablog

28Nov/075

Privacy or Openness. A shift in values?

While catching up on my Tweets tonight I noticed one from @shareski (and swooned over by @speters!) pointing out that Twitter made a cameo appearance on CSI, as shown in the video below...

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It's always interesting to see a less mainstream technology such as Twitter showing up in a very mainstream place like a top rating TV show... it's sort of like being a teenager and seeing your dad wearing the same brand of clothing as you... You just sort of get the feeling that he's only doing it to appear cool...

It seems to me that seeing Twitter on CSI signals a recognition of that technology, sort of the two ends of the long tail coming face to face for a moment. It's like reading a novel where the main character is a webdesigner or a podcaster, rather than a lawyer or an accountant.

I've never watched CSI so I don't know who they two characters are, but I really liked the exchange between them in this scene where they are looking through the victim's Twitter page for clues. As they browse the page, one guys comments that because the victim was a blogger she may have left a clue amongst her tweets, and with a slightly sarcastic tone he says "Some people just don't value privacy."

His partner retorts that "They don't expect privacy. They VALUE openness."

His colleague snorts back... "Whatever."

Listening to this exchange made me think about why some people are maybe less enthusiastic about embracing web 2.0 technologies. Whether they realise it on a conscious level or not, perhaps for many it really is about an idealogical struggle between two world views. Between valuing privacy or valuing openness. Many of our kids today seem to value openness more than they value privacy. Perhaps this gives an insight into why they are so willing to connect and share, so ready to engage in social networking practices, so willing to make connections online... perhaps they are growing up with a completely different mindset about the value of openness versus the importance of privacy.

As society's values change it can create a shift in our ability to see things from a new perspective. My parents generation generally valued things like thrift, savings, hard work, stability, personal sacrifice, and yes, probably privacy. That's quite a different picture I get of many kids today, where they seem to value things that are almost antithetical - living for the now, spending and materialism, flexibility, what's-in-it-for-me, community and openness.

As an educator I have to keep reminding myself that there has been some fundamental changes in what my kids value compared to what my parents taught me to value. While I don't want to put a blanket statement around this and make silly sweeping statement about "all kids today", I think there is certainly some truth to the idea that there HAS been an underlying shift in values that cause our kids to see the world through a sightly different lens than we do.

And even more importantly, we need to make sure our response to this difference is not just "Whatever."

Tags: web2.0, privacy, openness, csi, twitter

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Kids and Learning, microblogging, Social Change, Web Life 5 Comments

20Nov/076

Thinking about Thinking

Blogging started for me as a way to document a year living overseas, and although many serious bloggers sneer at the idea of using a blog for something as lowly as a simple travel diary, I found it a wonderful jumpoff point into the wider world of blogging. Not only do I now have a permanent record of a wonderful year in Canada, but that blog got me into the habit of writing regularly. And really, getting into a habit is an important part of the whole blogging experience. I guess, I'm writing this now because I hadn't written a post for a few days and I was starting to think that I needed to! Not for you. For me. This blogging thing has become an integral part of who I am, and when I go for a few days without writing it just doesn't feel right.

But the habit is not just about writing, it's about thinking. It's about engaging with ideas that you read on other blogs, or through listening to podcasts, or even from trawling through Twitter posts. It's about simply not being able to let that river of ideas flow past you without having to respond in some way. I can't imagine being exposed to this rich smorgasbord of ideas without having some reaction to them, and responding via a blog seems like such a natural thing to do. It's definitely about the thinking and not the writing... (in fact if you only knew what a lousy typist I am, you'd realise that the actual writing is a real pain!)

So I blog. I can't help myself.

What's become really interesting though is the environment that the blogging habit exposes you to. Without realising it, I look at my feedreader these days and it amazes me just who I have been inviting into my world, and even more amazingly, who has been inviting me into theirs. Browsing through my Skype contact list is like a who's who of incredible educators from all around the world. My Twitter feed is a rich tapestry of deep thoughts, trivial chatter and personal relationships, but it's engaging me with these constant ideas about learning, teaching and the relationships we form with kids in our classrooms.

Having just gone through the process of applying for another job, it really struck me just how much my online world has contributed to who I am as an educator. I don't have a string of letters after my name, in fact I'm not even teaching in the same discipline as I was originally trained. I've occasionally considered going back to university, doing some further study and becoming a bit more learned, but I look at the idea factory surrounding me and can't seem to justify the time and cost involved... and although I'm not sure how I'd ask the question, I suspect my new school saw enough of this world reflected in my interview that it played a big part in them offering me the position.

I did go back to university a few years ago to do part of a masters course in educational technology. It was a good experience, and forced me to start reading literature about learning that I wouldn't have done otherwise - Negroponte, Papert, Stoll, Cuban, Spender, etc - all names that I had never even heard before despite having been a teacher for many years. It was this exposure to ideas that flipped switches in my head and caused me to rethink a few things about school and learning. And it made me realise that many teachers never do this sort of thing at all. Try going to work on Monday and when your colleagues ask what you did on the weekend, tell then you went to an education conference (in your own time!) or read a book about learning theory, or chatted with other teachers about how to make learning more relevant, and see the sorts of odd looks you get, or the sarcastic "gee that must have been fun!" comments.

The thing is, I don't mind learning. In fact I can't imagine not learning. And exposure to this stream of ideas and thoughts and opinions is quite possibly the best environment for learning I've ever come across.

So maybe that makes me dysfunctional or just plain boring, but I really do enjoy the feeling of being stretched by new ideas all the time. I don't like to be the same today as I was yesterday, I want to be growing all the time. And one of the most rewarding and amazing ways of getting that constant stream of brain food is through the blogging and the writing and the reading and the podcasting and the sharing and the conversing with other people who I think are some of the smartest, brightest, cleverest people I know.

Tags: blogging, pln, pd

Popularity: 1% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:57 — 2.7MB)

Filed under: Blogging, Creativity, Social Change, Teacher PD 6 Comments

13Nov/071

Big Dreams, Big Opportunities

I had the good fortune to attend a talk this evening by Greg Whitby, the Executive Director of Education for the Catholic Education Parramatta Diocese. Greg was the special guest of the Australian College of Educators, and was speaking to a cosy little group of teachers at St Cath's Waverly.

Greg is one of those larger-than-life characters that has some fairly strong ideas about how education should look for the 21st Century, and I was pretty keen to hear him talk since I'd read quite a few articles about him. His views on school reform and his somewhat radical ideas on redesigning schools are aligned with a lot of my own thinking.

The talk focussed around a few key areas, among them the need for schools to reinvent themselves or to become dangerously irrelevant to our students, the need for teachers to engage in ongoing professional learning for themselves in order to truly embrace the notion of being a lifelong learner, and the way in which technology is simply an amplifier. Too often, says Whitby, the technology is seen in isolation as the "solution" to a school system's problems, whereas in truth it does little except to amplify what is already happening. His talk was peppered with examples of schools who have done a lot to put the technology in place but very little else to change the underlying paradigm of learning in order to leverage the effectiveness of that investment. What a waste.
There's no doubt that Greg is an idealist and an optimist, but maybe we need more of them in the senior levels of educational administration. He can certainly lay claim to putting the talk into action, and taking a really holistic approach to school reform. It's not about just the technology, it's about the pedagogy, the PD, the architecture, the social design, etc... rethinking school really does mean RETHINKING school. That means taking a clean piece of paper and asking the hard questions about redesigning the process and every aspect of supporting that process, in order to better answer the fundamental question of "How to we improve the learning outcomes for every student?" That is a worthwhile goal, and really comes down to the heart of what education should be about... it's not about remembering lots of stuff, not about getting better test scores, not about meeting some arbitrary standard... it's just about improving the learning for every kid that goes through the process. And the first step in making that happen is to deconstruct the entire process from ground level, accepting no preconceived notions about what already exists, and to question every assumption about what we mean by "school".

And it's a hard process. We had the chance at my school a couple of years ago to rethink what we were on about when we rewrote our strategic plan. We had consultants come in and try to help us work through that rethinking process, and they really did try to push us to question every paradigm, challenge every assumption. They kept pushing us to reinvent what "school" might mean for the future, but it seemed to have fallen on largely deaf ears, with very little substantive change taking place, and - I think - large gaps in our long term strategy simply because we were unable to step back and disassociate ourselves from our idea of "school" enough to blue sky about what it could really be like if we let ourselves dream a bit. Instead, we just reworded the Mission Statement, created some new levels of hierarchy, and produced a fancy brochure to proclaim our success. Such a missed opportunity.

I'm glad that people like Greg are in there, giving it a go. I'm sure that great success will ultimately emerge from the process, even if it is just through his sheer force of will. I just hope there is enough people who share his vision, and most importantly his determination to actually make it happen, that these initiatives continue to take hold in a big way.

Thanks for the inspiration Greg.

Tags: gregwhitby, ACE, school reform, reinventing school

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Creativity, Schools, Social Change, Teacher PD 1 Comment

11Sep/072

The Fall of the Wall

We often talk about the need for schools to change, to become more relevant to the needs of the 21st century learner. And sometimes we talk about it like we know it's something that ought to happen because, well, the times they are a-changin' and maybe we should start change with them. But I think we need to start talking about it more in terms of this change being an imperative. The need for this change is quickly becoming not optional. Schools are becoming dangerously irrelevant to many of our students because we continue to focus on ways of doing things that simply don't connect to the way many of them see the world.

I was browsing through YouTube tonight and I stumbled across some old footage of the collapse of the Berlin wall back in 1989.

This video got me remembering a quote about education I once read from Seymour Papert. It was this...

"I think that it might be useful to think of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think that seemed to be a system that was as unchangeable as our education system seems to be. It's a system, I think, that was becoming increasingly incompatible with the modern world for reasons not very different from those that operate in the education system. It tried to run a country as a production line, as a top-down command economy in which what people made would be determined by a committee somewhere. We try in our school systems to decide what people will learn in this top-down, centralized way, and, for the same reason, it is not compatible with the complexities and dynamic possibilities of the modern world.

I think the subject is increasing strain. The decision to be made is not whether we will continue with school or change it. It will collapse. Our question is whether we'll wait until we're driven to the wall and the system collapses from within from its own internal contradictions before we decide that we're going to create conditions that will allow a new system in which there'll be diversity of learning paths, diversity of teaching methods, diversity of subjects to be learned."

You may think that a comparison between the former Soviet Union and our current education system is a little drastic, but I think there are many valid comparisons. Traditional school systems are usually very top-down organisations, and still many teachers believe that running a classroom is all about maintaining control. Our schools are still filled with systems that try to control and direct most of what students do... we have timetables to manage what our students should be doing at any given moment of the day, and we ring bells to tell them when they can change what they are doing. We lead them through a preplanned curriculum, lockstep, progressing from grade to grade at a rate designed for the average student, drip feeding them content that we think they need, whether they need it or not. We insist that they dress a certain way and follow certain rules, even if many times we have forgotten why the rules were there in the first place. We ban mobile phones and iPods because they are a threat to the established order. We track every movement our students make across our networks and we block any websites that we think might not be "educational" enough.

Then, when our students go home everything changes. They engage with a range of ideas, usually all at the same time. Our students are great multi-taskers. They follow their own interests, learning what they need to know, when they need to know it. They build networks of friends, many of whom they have never met but who share similar interests and ideas. Our students may not all be highly organised when it comes to school work, but many of them manage a hectic social life and a part time job. Many of them live online, constantly connected to their networks, relying on communication technologies like their cell phones, instant messaging, and their social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Track the out of school activity of the average student and compare how much overlap there is with what school tries to tell them is important. There isn't much.

So we talk a lot about the need for school to address this gap. We talk about introducing new technologies into our classrooms to "engage" the students. We keep hearing about "Digital Natives" and "Digital Immigrants", and while it's an interesting way to think about the generational differences, the fact is that the world these kids live in has become one big digital neighbourhood and everyone needs to get comfortable with that idea, whether you are a native or an immigrant. Being able to have that distinction is a luxury we can no longer afford.

I agree with Papert. This incompatibility between "school" as it so commonly stands, and the "real world" that engages our students has to be addressed, and soon, or we will face an unavoidable backlash in the next few years. The need for drastic educational change is on our doorstep, and it cannot be held back for very much longer. As Victor Hugo wrote, "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."

How we manage the tension between these two ideologies will be critical to our success. But we need to start really rethinking what "school" is about because our students are starting to gather on one side of the wall right now. The cracks are starting to appear. This always-on generation is armed with picks and shovels in the form of their social networks, their communication technologies, their access to instant information, and they are eager to smash this wall down, drive through it and explore the big world on the other side.

As teachers, the question facing us is this... will you be there helping them swing the pick-axe and encouraging them to tear down the wall, or will you be standing in the middle of the stampede trying to force them back? If we aren't part of the solution, we might just be part of the problem.

Tags: education, papert, berlin wall, change

Popularity: 1% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:16 — 3.6MB)

Filed under: Kids and Learning, Social Change 2 Comments

10Aug/070

Turning Data into Knowledge

Steve Madsen emailed me a few months ago behalf of the NSW Computer Studies Teachers Association, asking if I'd like to run a workshop at the next CSTA quarterly meeting. He didn't have any particular theme in mind at the time, and indicated that he was happy for me to pick the topic... anything that might be useful to teachers of computing... and he asked that I get back to him with my idea for a workshop. No problem I said.

I thought about what might be useful to a group of computing teachers. They would be a tech savvy group, so what could I possibly share with them? As much as it might sound like a buzzword, it seems to me that there is still an awful lot about the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon that many teachers are still trying to get their heads around, so I thought something along those lines might be useful. I didn't want it to be too predictable though, and simply talking about blogs and wikis seemed like just a little too... I don't know... obvious? I started thinking about ways to explore the ideas behind Web 2.0 in a fundamental yet interesting way. Around the same time, I was struck by a couple of websites that do some very Web 2.0 sorts of things, and when looked at in context with each other it became clear that they were tapping into the same fundamental principles in some very interesting ways.

The three sites that grabbed my attention were www.ilike.com, www.43things.com, and del.icio.us. All of these sites shared the same underlying theme of tagging personal data which could then be viewed as a semantic snapshot of the collective consciousness. That seemed like a cool concept to me; this idea of thousands of people all voluntarily submitting many terabytes of content to the web - a massive collection of text, photos, audio and video. More importantly, they were also submitting their opinions and interpretations about that content, and doing it in a way where it could be collated and organised into a broader meaning. Thinking I was being clever, I decided to call the workshop "I Like 43 Delicious Things".

I emailed Steve back with the idea and he responded by saying that the DET proxy filters might make it hard to do much with that, since they are locked down pretty tight. A little disappointed, I figured I'd mull it over a bit more and maybe some other idea would come to me. However, the next time I heard from Steve he sent me a copy of the agenda for the meeting and there was my original workshop suggestion, listed as a definite thing. Hmm, now I had to make my clever idea actually work.

I sent a couple of emails to clarify the filter situation and it seemed that I might be able to go ahead with the original idea after all, so I started to gather some resources for the workshop. I kinda sorta knew what I wanted to say, but it was all still a bit nebulous in my head. How could I tie it all together so that it made sense to people? (and me!)

It's funny how things just fall into place sometimes... a few days before the workshop I was still trying to figure out how to make sense of my original idea, and I stumbled across three items that brought it all together for me... one I'd come across before but completely forgotten about, and the other two I'd never seen. When I put these three resources together with the three original websites, it formed a powerful summary of what I felt was going on behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Del.icio.us's use of tagging to create semantic taxonomies of knowledge was pretty clear to me. The way the tag clouds formed around large collections of bookmarked resources provided a clear snapshot into their hidden meaning. The same concept seemed to apply to the lists of personal goals submitted by people on 43things.com. Lots of people sharing ideas about life goals and forming patterns of collective thought by contributing those thoughts into one place. By tagging and adding metadata to their goals, it formed a "zeitgeist" picture of what the masses were thinking about. Finally, ilike.com tapped into the large store of metadata collected within thousands of iTunes music libraries and brought it all together online to form a collective community of music lovers that were able to share their tastes and suggestions, linking musical tastes and suggestions from the crowd. Three very different sites that all used a common idea of data sharing, metadata tagging and community building.

The glue that held these ideas together was three more things... Firstly, a website which created dynamic tag clouds based on the past 200+ years of US presidential speeches. Chirag Mehta has cleverly been able to delve into the words of America's past presidents, analyse the frequency and relative importance of their words, and create an interactive tag cloud concept which gives an amazing insight into the way the issues of their day could be seen as a summary of the culture at the time. It was a powerful example of the way existing data can be easily mined for greater meaning.

The second resource was a video called The Machine is Us/ing Us. Although this video has shown up on many education blogs in the last few months, it really explains well why the web is the way it is right now, and how the contribution of user data, tagging, XML and CSS are increasingly responsible for the new web landscape.

The final resource was a video from the TED Talks series called "The Web's Secret Stories" by Jonathan Harris. In this video, Harris shows a piece of research work (it was more like conceptual art to me) called We Feel Fine. This incredible piece of work needs to be seen for yourself, but I felt it perfectly tied the loose threads together... it was the closest thing I've seen to an IT-based system that constantly analyses the random thoughts of the blogosphere's collective consciousness in near real-time and massages it into a form that is not only informative and interesting, but utterly compelling. You simply must watch the video, then go have a play with the website. It is amazing.

I think most people got something out of the workshop, at least I hope they did. More to the point, I know that I learnt an enormous amount by preparing to share this information with my colleagues. I felt I came away from it with a much deeper insight in the nature of the new web, and in the process got to grips with tools that I had often used but never truly understood. It's so true that if you want to really understand something, try teaching it to someone else.

Tags: web2.0, csta, tagging, zeitgeist, tagcloud

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Ed Tech, Mashup, Social Change, Web Life, web2.0 No Comments

1Aug/070

Change can be Painful

You read a lot about change and the need for schools to rethink and reinvent themselves for the needs of 21st century learners. It's sometimes frustrating for those of use who really want this change to happen when we feel we have to drag our less eager colleagues along kicking and screaming. It must also be pretty frustrating, threatening, scary, to those who are quite happy with the status quo and are content to leave things just as they are. It's hard to understand why we need to change what we've always done, especially if it's always worked for us in the past.

One of the nice aspects of the blogosphere is the way it so easily enables one to stumble upon interesting thoughts written by others. It's especially rewarding when you come across a different thoughts from different places, but that just happen to strike you at the around the same time so that those ideas just bounce off each other, each giving depth to the other. Serendipity I believe it's called...

So I present these two post grabs for your consideration... the first is from David Weiss. David is a software developer at the Macintosh Business Unit of Microsoft and this post is some advice that his father gave him about change.

I am different. So I need to figure out how others think, because they don't think like I do.

Learning about change is not changing.

Most people agree that improvement and change is needed, until it means they have to change.

Getting someone to want to change is hard.

The power of the group, has something in it that facilitates change. (Carl Rogers)

Most leaders say, "You need to do this... You need to change... Good luck! See you later." Instead of, "You can change. I can help."

It's important to setup an environment that balances building the person and getting the job done.

At around the same time, I came across these thoughts from Wil Richardson's blog. Wil was, in turn, quoting others when he wrote...

"It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change" – Charles Darwin

"The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." - Alvin Toffler

There is little doubt in my mind about the need for some serious change in our approach to the way we help kids learn. Although I see a lot of teachers making some effort to think about the need for this change, I am continually struck by how unwilling some of them are to actually DO something about it. The quote from Darwin really rings true for me... if we don't embrace the changing nature of our students and the 21st century digital culture in which they are immersed, we run a real risk of becoming irrelevant to the kids we teach.

And yet, I can totally relate to the thoughts from David Weiss's father, that change is hard, change is painful and people sometimes need love and kindness to get through it. You can't force change upon people, they will do it when they feel they are ready, but we have to get the message through that the time to do it is right now.

Our world, and our schools, are not static places. They change. Culture changes. Society changes. Technology changes. And whether we like it or not, we have to change with them.

Tags: schools, society, change, culture

Popularity: 1% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:08 — 2.2MB)

Filed under: Kids and Learning, Schools, Social Change No Comments

5Jul/070

The Long Tail is getting Longer

About six months ago, due to a major change in my own personal situation, I moved back into my mother's house. Fortunately, she lives in a big house and I moved into the downstairs part of it where it is pretty much self contained and self sufficient. I have my own bedroom, loungeroom, bathroom and study area, so things could be a lot worse.

What I'm finding fascinating though is just how little time I spend watching TV or listening to the radio these days. In the past 6 months I think I have watched TV about 4 times, and only then because I was completely bored. I don't even have a radio, except the one in my car and I never listen to that. Instead, I have been listening to a lot of podcasts which I subscribe to via the iTunes directory. For entertainment I watch a lot of video blogs, again sourced largely via download through the iTunes directory and viewed using my Mac or my video iPod. I even get regular news and weather reports directly on my 3G mobile phone via the 3 mobile web service, called Planet 3, and rarely read an actual newspaper anymore. I have a large number of RSS feeds that deliver customised news and information directly to my computer. And all that extra time I used to spend watching TV is now used to create content rather than consume it, and instead I find myself blogging, podcasting, writing and editing my own media.

And it's not just me... tonight, my kids are here visiting. My 15 year old son Alex is sitting at his laptop watching a vodcast of the Chaser's War on Everything, and will probably go play a video game of some sort in a minute. My 12 year old daughter Kate is using my video iPod to watch a few episodes of Family Guy, and before firing up the iPod she spent some time updating her new blog.

The TV is not on. There's no radio. And we don't even buy the newspaper.

This whole "Long Tail" concept is really hitting home to me. I am seeing and experiencing the reality of this huge shift away from the delivery of traditional media content by conventional means like TV, radio and newspapers. Alex was telling me the other day how he read that all of the major TV stations in Australia are experiencing a large decline in ther viewership. It's no surprise that newspapers and magazines are selling in smaller numbers than ever before. And radio stations are stuggling to maintain listeners. Traditional media is in big trouble...

Meanwhile, we keep seeing an explosion in the number of people using the Internet as their main source of news, information and entertainment. Blogging and podcasting are growing exponentially. Mobile phones are moving into the delivery of full broadband-type services and are selling by the hundreds of millions.

My own kids are a living example of just how much the nature of information flow has changed in the last few years. They are no strangers to this... they live out on the long tail of cultural change. They are just typical kids, and this is their world. And yet I know that many of their teachers are blissfuly unaware of just how much their world has changed. Many hardworking, well meaning teachers are completely unaware of the magnitude of these changes. For my own kids and thousands more like them, going to school means turning up and being taught using a methodology and a mindset that is essentially the same as it ever was with very little acknowledgement that things have changed as dramatically as they actually have.

If these sorts of changes do not represent a fundamental shift in the way our society works, then I don't know what does. I fail to see how people can not recognise this huge cultural paradigm shift that has taken place, and that our world and the way we communicate and learn has changed irrevocably.

technorati tags:longtail, media, podcasting

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Kids and Learning, Schools, Social Change No Comments

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