How Tagging Solves the Problem of the Physical World
This article was written for Education Technology Solutions magazine, but I've also republished it here, because I can.
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One of the unavoidable buzzwords of Web 2.0 is the term “tag”. Everywhere you look online you come across the term, and everything from photos to news articles to blogposts are getting “tagged”.
But what exactly are “tags” and why are they such a big deal these days? To understand the importance of tagging, first let’s consider the problem that tagging sets out to solve.
There was a time when everything in our lives existed only in the physical world. Books sat on shelves. Photos were in photo albums. Music was stored on CDs. Life was simple. If you wanted to find that photo of your sister-in-law Wendy wearing a silly hat at last year’s family Christmas party you simply went to the family photo album and flicked through the pages till you found it. The photo was a real physical object that existed in one real physical location.
Storing a photo in a family photo album seems pretty obvious, but the problem is that this method of storing, finding and accessing an object does not scale well. If we had to find that one photo from a room full of photo albums the problem becomes a little trickier. The ability to quickly find something becomes exponentially more difficult as the size of the collection of objects increases, and also as the object becomes more miscellaneous.
For example, have you ever wandered the aisles of a supermarket trying to find a particular item, only to discover that it was located in a completely different section to the one you expected it to be in? The more obvious items are easy - milk is in the diary section, steak is in the meat section and frozen beans are in the frozen vegetable section of the freezer. Easy. But as the item gets more unusual or miscellaneous, it gets harder to know just where the supermarket has cataloged it on their shelves. We expect to find tinned fruit salad in the canned goods section of the supermarket, but if you like to put fruit salad on your breakfast cereal it would also be handy to have it located in the cereal aisle, in fact it might even boost sales of the tinned fruit. Both of these locations actually make sense, although the people responsible for stacking the supermarket shelves ultimately have to make a decision and put it in only one location.
Why don’t they just put items in every location where it makes sense? Why not put items in multiple places, making it easier for people to find them no matter where they look?
Of course, the answer is due to the physical limitations of the world we live in. Supermarkets simply don’t have the physical space to put items in multiple locations. Even if they did, trying to shop in a store that had lots of products in lots of places would end up as a confusing mess. The idea makes sense, but it doesn’t really work very well in the physical world we live in. In the physical world these limitations force us to make decisions about the “best” location for every real object.
In an digital world, these limitations of physical objects don’t exist.
Take bookmarking for example. When you browse the Web you often find useful websites that you may want to revisit again, and all web browsing software offers the ability to “bookmark” or “favorite” these sites to make them easy to get back to. We typically find an interesting website, click the Bookmark menu and choose “Save as Bookmark”... when we want to go back to that webpage, we look through our list of bookmarks and select the one we want from that list
As our collection of bookmarks grows into a long random list most of us eventually work out that we need to organise them somehow, so we start putting our bookmarks into collection, or folders. Sites that are personal might go into a folder called “Personal” while sites that are useful for work are dropped into a folder called “Work”. Again, as your collection grows you’ll probably find that you need to be more specific, so you end up with a collection of folders designated with names like “IWB Resources”, “Maths Resources” or “Games”. You can keep adding folders, bookmarking new websites into existing folders or adding more folders if appropriate ones don’t yet exist. Things are nicely organised now, right?
Sort of.
What happens when you find a really good Maths game resource that works well on an IWB? Do you put it in the IWB Resources folder, the Maths resources folder or the Games folder? The truth is, it makes sense to put it in all of these. You could always bookmark it three times, once in each folder, but as your collection grows, you realise that this could get pretty unwieldy and complicated. You could just make a decision and put it in one folder only, but unless you remember which one it went into, you may never find it when you need it. You are now facing the same problem as the supermarket shelf stackers; you have an object - in this case a website - that makes sense in more than one place, but to put it in multiple locations is just going to be confusing and hard to maintain.
The solution is to use tags. Tags are like keywords that get attached to a resource and used as search terms when you want to retrieve it. A resource can have as many tags as you like, in fact the more tags the better. It’s a little bit like saving the resource in multiple locations, except instead of having to actually place it in all those locations, the tags simply create an association with those locations.
Tagging works because the tagged objects are digital, not physical. In the digital world, things don’t ever really “exist” anywhere, so having them “exist” in multiple locations becomes a non-issue. A search for all the websites tagged with the word “maths” will generate a list of every website with the tag “maths” attached to it. The search doesn’t care where each website is physically located. The only thing that matters is that every website has the keyword - or tag - “maths” attached to it.
The fact that the same site might be both an IWB resource and also a game is largely irrelevant. If a tag search was done for websites tagged with the word “game”, then the IWB-based maths game website would still be in the list. The beauty of tags is that they allow resources to be cataloged in any ways that make sense. A decision does not need to be made about the best way to catalog an item, because it can be cataloged in any and every way that makes sense.
In a digital world, photos that are tagged with keywords can be easily retrieved from a huge collection just by looking for one or more keywords. So, if that photo of your sister-in-law was tagged with words like “christmas”, “sillyhat” and “wendy”, then any of these search terms would find the photos. Someone searching for the word “christmas” would find it, along with every other photo in the collection tagged with the word “christmas”. Searching with the term “wendy” would find all the photos of Wendy, and a search using “sillyhat” would find any photo tagged with that term, regardless of who was wearing the silly hat. To find the specific photo you were after, a search using several of these tags would quickly narrow down the search to photos of Wendy, at Christmas, wearing a silly hat. Each tag acts like a filter to only show the photos that match the criteria.
Tagging works because computers are really good at quickly searching through massive amounts of data. Getting computers to find things is pretty easy, but tagging adds the necessary “hooks” that the search can latch onto. Without these tags attached to each resource, computers find it difficult to link each resource to the ideas that you wish to associate with them. The computer might be able to find things quickly, but tagging helps it know how those things relate to YOU. By adding tags to things, you build a collection of metadata around each object that makes it meaningful to you. It lets you associate those objects to ideas that make personal sense to you. And as you tag more and more resources, patterns start to emerge that make it even easier to see the semantic nature of that information, further helping you make sense of it.
Tagging is everywhere on the web however if you are new to the idea and want to see tagging in action, two great place to start are www.delicious.com for web bookmarks, and www.flickr.com for digital photography. Searching these sites using tags is a nice easy way to see the real value of tagging as a way to organise massive amounts of information in a digital world.
For more detailed information about tagging and how to use it effectively, take a look a my K12 Online presentation entitled “I Like Delicious Things” at http://vimeo.com/2415647.
I Like Delicious Things from Chris Betcher on Vimeo.
Image: 'Symmetry'
www.flickr.com/photos/38425817@N00/271683015
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The shocking cost of international data
I was in New Zealand recently for a conference and thoroughly enjoyed my time in the Land of the Long White Cloud. I got to meet other passionate educators, talk geeky edtech stuff and just generally hang out with them for a couple of days. As part of the fun of hanging out with fellow geeks, I made a short video from my Nokia N95 using the live streaming ability of Qik. The live stream was just a bit of fun, and went for a total of 5 minutes and 15 seconds. Apart from the brief live stream, I also checked my email twice using the mobile Gmail client, and also checked my location on a Google Map while wandering through the streets of Napier.
While in Napier, a text message arrived from my carrier, 3 Mobile, saying that my account balance for the month has just reached $535. What??!! I mean, I know that mobile roaming can be expensive, but surely this had to be some sort of mistake! I switched my phone off and left it off until I returned to Australia.
When I arrived back home (I was in NZ for three days) I rang 3 Mobile to clarify their message. I was told that, yes, I had been using data while roaming and that my roaming data bill was $480 (plus my regular monthly charges). I was stunned. How can anyone possibly accrue a $480 roaming data bill in just a couple of days, and quite literally only using mobile broadband for less than 10 minutes in total?
I spoke to a "3 Care" operator, who kept calling me "Christopher" and repeating back every question I asked her. She was almost no help whatsoever, so eventually I insisted that she escalate this call to a supervisor. The supervisor I spoke to was equally as unhelpful, and told me that he would have to check with a different department and get back to me.
Two days later, they called back and basically reiterated everything they said on the last call, except they were now telling me that my roaming bill was $850, as all the data had not been logged as of my last contact with them. $850!!!!! For a few minutes of broadband access in New Zealand!!!
Outraged, I asked what they could do about this bill, only to be told that there was nothing they could do, that roaming data in New Zealand comes through NZ Vodafone and is charged at $20/Mb. I argued that $850 equated to roughly 42Mb of data and that I seriously doubted my mobile phone could have transferred 42Mb of data in less than 10 minutes. The supervisor said they would check it and get back to me.
A week later, I had still heard nothing, so I called them back again, having to explain the whole story again to a new person. This guy agreed that the data charges did seem excessive and way beyond my regular monthly charge. He commiserated and said he was sorry, but insisted that there was nothing he could do. He said the charges would stick, although they offered a token $100 discount.
I pointed out that I had been a customer with 3 Mobile since its inception in Australia, in fact I was one of their original "family and Friends" customers. I pointed out that I pay my bill on time each month and do in fact pay a relatively high amount every month for their services, since I don't have a landline and my mobile phone is my only phone. I pointed out that between my immediate family, I am responsible for a number of phone accounts with them. He agreed I was a model customer, but still refused to do anything about my bill. This call lasted nearly an hour, only to get absolutely nowhere.
So, 3 Mobile, I'm not happy with you. You charge 50 cents a Mb for off-network data roaming in Australia, yet have the audacious gall to charge me $20 per Mb when I'm in New Zealand? You have the courtesy to send me a warning SMS when my balance gets excessive, but the balls to wait until it's more than six times my regular monthly spend until you bother flagging it with me? You admit that the charge is excessive, yet you happily charge me for it? Your response to me was that I should read the terms of service more carefully and that it was all there in the fine print. (Try finding it on their website without using the search function!)
I threatened to cancel my phone services with you, and still you insist that there is nothing you can do about this bill. You would rather lose me as a long term valued customer, than to cut me some slack on this outrageously excessive charge.
I WILL cancel all of my phone services with you, and I will take as many other account holders with me as possible. I'm not happy, 3 Mobile. Not happy at all.
To everyone else who reads this, my advice is to be really careful when travelling with your mobile phone overseas. Data roaming charges can be ridiculously excessive, even for small amounts of usage. Check the data roaming costs before you leave home and perhaps even disable it unless you really need it. Even at those costs, there is no way I would have expected an $850 bill for a few minutes of network use.
Oh, and my other advice would be to avoid 3 Mobile as a carrier. Their attitude to their customers sucks.
UPDATE: Just received my official bill from 3 this morning... the final amount was $874.41. I have also lodged a formal complaint with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. Oh, and then I also find out about this! Wish I'd have know about it a few weeks ago!
Popularity: 16% [?]
Virtual Busking her way to Japan
My daughter Kate loves to sing. She discovered this ability a few years ago when she came home from school and announced that she wanted to try out for a solo part in a local performing arts concert. Although we always thought she had a nice voice that could carry a tune, we had totally missed the fact that she was actually quite talented vocally and so her intention to sing solo at this concert was a bit of a surprise. Long story short, she has discovered her voice and is working hard at developing it further. She's done workshops and music camps and is now working with a singing coach. She really does love to sing.
She was recently selected to be part of the Talent Advancement Program (TAP), a program for kids with musical talent aged 13 to 18. For the 23 kids selected to be part of TAP, it's a pretty special group to be take part of. They get to learn and grow by actually performing in front of people. Tomorrow, they are all performing at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, next week they do a gig for some senior citizens, and so on. All great experience.
From the 23 kids involved, 16 of them were chosen to take part in a cultural exchange to Japan later this year. Our local city, Bankstown, has a sister city arrangement with Suita, a city just outside Osaka. The kids will be going over in October, performing in local schools in Suita and living with a host family for 5 days. They also get to travel on the Bullet Train, see a bit more of Japan, and even perform at Tokyo Disneyland. It will be quite the experience for a 13 year old girl!
As parents, you want your kids to have experiences like this. The things she will see and experience on this trip will be amazing. To be immersed in a different culture for 10 days, especially one like Japan which has such different customs and food, will be awesome and unforgettable.
Of course, it comes at a cost. Despite the fact that the TAP program subsidises part of the airfare, there is still a significant cost involved in going. As excited as Kate was to have been selected, she was also quite apprehensive about accepting because of that cost. Despite that, her mother and I will try to find the money because we think it's an experience worth having. To help out, the TAP kids were encouraged to come up with ways of doing some fundraising to help contribute to the costs of the trip.
So Kate came up with an idea. She collected a bunch of videos of her singing and put them together on a website as a sort of "virtual busking" site. The videos were added to YouTube and embedded in the site so that viewers can watch, and a "tipjar" connected to Paypal in case anyone wants to make a donation to her trip. She asked me for a hand with some of the technical stuff, but the rest of it was all her idea.
I'm very proud of her, not just for being part of a group like TAP, but also for her initiative in wanting to find an innovative way to raise some money to cover this cost. She's telling family and friends about it, but I said I'd also try to help spread the word about it via Twitter and the blogosphere. I hope you take a moment to check it out, leave an encouraging comment on the discussion tabs, and possibly even drop a small donation in her tip jar. I know she would appreciate it greatly.
The site is at www.katebetcher.com.
Popularity: 2% [?]
The Stupidity of Selling the Farm
My son Alex, who is 16 years old and just starting year 11, attends Hurlstone Agricultural School. It's a school that's been around for over 100 years, and has a couple of features that make it a fairly unique place to go to school.
For a start, it's a state-run government school, but it also happen to be a boarding school. There are, to the best of my knowledge, only two government boarding schools in all of NSW. Secondly, it's an academically selective school. This means that for most students to attend the school they have to have a proven track record of academic achievement and some evidence that they are relatively bright. Thirdly, and perhaps the thing that makes it most unique, is that it is an agricultural school. As such, it offers mandatory (up to year 10) courses in agriculture, and the school is located on 276 acres of beautiful rolling farmland. It is, in fact, a fully working farm, complete with a commercial dairy, as well as raising cattle, chickens, sheep, pigs and other assorted animals.
The boarding school exists because, as an ag school, it provides study options for country kids who live on farms in remote areas of the state. They come to the big city, live in the boarding house and learn all about agriculture and farming at the school, so they can take this knowledge back to the family farm.
As you might imagine, this mix of city kids and country kids, along with the fact that it is academically selective, makes it a pretty special place to go to school.
It seems the state government wants to change all that. Late last year, under the leadership of Premier Nathan Rees, the government announced that it plans to sell off the farm land for housing in 2011. The school community is obviously not too happy about the idea, and there is a lot of political noise being made at at the moment to try and convince the government that this is a bad idea. Angry parents are mobilising themselves with letter-writing campaigns, complaining to local politicians, trying to make enough noise about it that the decision will be rescinded. We can only hope that common sense will prevail in the end and the stupidity of the decision to lose the school's greatest asset will be revoked, although what with politicians being politicians, it might be difficult to beat the lure of the almighty dollar.
It's ironic that the term "selling the farm" is often used as a metaphor for failing to value your most essential assets, but in this case the government is quite literally "selling the farm", dairy and all. It is land that will never be able to be replaced, greedily sold to make a profit at the expense of providing a unique and important educational facility.
Without the farm, the school will be nothing. It needs to be saved. I've written a number of letters to politicians about this, but their response has been less than impressive. If you are reading this and want to assist, I'd encourage you to write to one of our NSW politicians. Tell them, politely but strongly, what a stupid idea this is and how it will ruin the character of a truly unique school. (Remember that when you write to politicians that email counts for very little, and a real letter on real paper with a real stamp is taken notice of far more than electronic correspondence.) There is also a Save Hurlstone Facebook group you can join if you'd like to do that.
The other thing that took me by surprise yesterday was finding out that Alex had worked with some of his friends at school to produce a short video about why the farm needs to be saved, which was then posted to YouTube. I'm surprised because he never mentioned it to me at all and I found out quite by accident. The film, titled Pro Patria (the school motto, meaning "For my country") is about 8 minutes long and does a great job of explaining, from a students' perspective, why the farm is so important and why it should be saved. It's a wonderful example of how students can use social media tools like YouTube to have a voice. I'd encourage you to watch it, and spread it around to people you know. The more times it gets watched, the better, if for no other reason than letting our politicians know that people are taking an interest in this issue. If you can, leave a comment on the YouTube page as well.
I know that YouTube is a contentious issue in many schools, often banned because of the potential problems it might cause. But this is a great example of how students have used YouTube for good rather than evil, using it to have a real voice and to express an opinion about an issue they obviously care deeply about.
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7 Things
Yes, it's meme time again. A meme, according to wikipedia, "comprises a unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena." In other words, it's a way to help spread a culture.
The blogosphere occasionally sends these memes around as a way to spread this culture of online community... sort of like a "getting to know you" exercise that you might do with students on the first day of class. A topic is chosen, people respond to it and then pass the meme along to others to contribute to. By tagging others like this, the meme spreads quickly.
I was tagged a couple of days ago in a meme called 7 Things You Don't Need To Know About Me, by a PE teacher in Victoria named Jarrod Robinson, or mrrobbo to those that know him. He was tagged by Rodd Lucier from Canada, otherwise known as thecleversheep. (I find it interesting that Rodd lives in Ontario Canada, where I happen to be at the moment, so in two hops, this meme has gone from one side of the planet to the other. Such is the nature of our online world...)
So here you go, 7 things you (really) don't need to know about me...
- I liked school when I was a kid, did reasonably well at it, but didn't take it at all seriously. During the 4 weeks of study time before the HSC I went surfing every day. Did ok in the HSC, but really improved my forehand bottom turns.
- I used to surf when I was a kid, but mainly I used to skateboard. Unlike school, I took skateboarding very seriously and spent most weekends trekking across Sydney looking for unused pipes or empty swimming pools.
- I like dogs, but usually find the work required to own one too much work. Feeding, walking and cleaning up after a dog can often outweigh the joys of owning one. Despite this, I've still had several dogs over the years. Don't even get me started on cats.
- Despite learning the piano when I was a kid, I cannot play one at all now. However, I taught myself to play the bass guitar in my teens, and played in several bands when I was at art school, including this one.
- I'm a terrible dancer. Nothing much more to add to that, I just am.
- I allegedly snore. I've never heard myself doing it, but apparently I do. I've discovered Breathe Right strips recently and (I'm told) things are much better now.
- When I was 25 years old, my tax return listed my official occupation as a Professional Rally Driver. I drove a car in the Wynns Australian Safari that year and thanks to a generous sponsorship arrangement, I actually made the bulk of my income that year as a rally driver.
That'll do.
I now pass this meme along to...
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Where does cheating begin?
Imagine this scenario... you are suddenly diagnosed with a life threatening disease, something very dangerous but quite curable if you have the right information about how to do so. Your doctor knows that there is an answer to your serious problem, but cannot recall what drug is required to treat it. He remembers reading something about it a long time ago, but can no longer recall the exact name of the drug.
He reaches towards the mouse on his computer, and begins to click a link that will take him to the online medical directory where he will find the answer he needs to cure your condition.
"Stop!", you declare. "That's cheating! If you can't remember the name of that drug without looking it up, then what sort of doctor are you? I want you to just remember it without looking it up."
Of course, I imagine that if this situation were real you would be only too happy for the doctor to do whatever was required to find the cure for your disease. You wouldn't think twice about whether it might be considered "cheating" to look up the information needed to save your life... in fact you'd better hope that you have a doctor who a) knows there is an answer out there somewhere, and b) knows how to find it quickly.
I pondered this scenario today because I went to a dinner party with about 40 other people and we were presented with a trivia quiz on the table, something to keep us busy and entertained between food courses. Being a celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving, the questions were all about Canada. Now, I actually know quite a bit about Canada... I lived there for a year, travelled quite extensively through the historic eastern provinces, read a few books about Canadian history, and I have a Canadian girlfriend. So I did know the answer to quite a few of the questions.
Of course, there were also questions I didn't know the answer to. And being the curious type who likes a challenge and to always learn more, I reached for my Nokia N95, pointed it to Google, and started looking for the answers to the questions I didn't know. If you have reasonable information literacy skills and can come up with good search keywords, finding answers to simple recall-style questions with Google is pretty easy. In fact, you can usually find the answers just from the Google search results page without even going to the websites they link to. It was not long before I had the elusive answers... in fact, I actually stumbled across the exact quiz that the questions were lifted from. Whoever put the quiz together had not changed anything, just used it directly from this website. I casually copied down all the unknown answers onto the sheet and waited until it needed to be submitted.
Of course, when the sheets were finally collected and tallied, there was general astonishment that someone could have actually gotten all the questions 100% correct! A few people who knew what I'd done bandied about words like "cheating" and "unfair".
For the record, I did not accept the prize - a lovely bottle of red wine - because I willingly admitted I had some help from my friends Mr Google and Mr Wikipedia, and I figured it would not have been fair to accept the prize. I guess I just like to be a bit of a stirrer sometimes in order to make a point, even if only to myself.
But seriously, why do we build entire education systems based on rewarding people who can respond with the correct answers to questions, but then assume that any use of a tool to help them do this is cheating? Why would a doctor in the scenario above get applauded for doing whatever was necessary to find an answer to the problem, but a student who does the same thing is considered a cheat.
If basic recall of facts is all that matters, a tool like Google can make you the smartest person in the room. Today's trivia quiz proved that. If finding answers anywhere at anytime is a valuable thing to be able to do, then a mobile phone should be a standard tool you carry everywhere.
What I think people were really saying was that, if I was allowed to use my phone to find answers and everyone else wasn't, then that would give me an unfair advantage. And that may be true if I was the only person with access to Google, but the fact is that I didn't do anything that every other person in that room could have done if they'd have chosen to. The fact is, I was the only one in the room who used a tool that we all potentially had access to, but because I used that tool it made me a "cheat".
And here's the real point... mostly we ban these tools in our classrooms. And we generally consider any student that uses such tools to find answers to our narrow questions to be a cheat. And we drill into kids that when we ask them questions, when we set up those "exam conditions", they better not even think about being "enterprising" or "creative" or "problem solvers"... Just know the answers to the questions, and show all your working too, dammit.
And you'd better hope that if one of those students ever grows up to be your doctor, the rigid thinking we may have instilled in them about "knowing the answers" has been replaced with a far more flexible skill for "finding the answers". Let's hope that our kids don't have too much trouble unlearning all the bizarre thinking that schools spend so much time drilling into them.
What do you think? At what point does the ability to find answers cross the line and become cheating?
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The New Digital Divide?
I have on occasion been frustrated - dare I say critical - of the sometimes glacial pace of change in the broader educational community when it comes to embracing the use of ICT. I occasionally say things that might make me appear less compassionate than I really am. But believe it or not, I really do have a great degree of patience and time for anyone who is genuinely interested to know more about how to effectively integrate technology into the demanding job of teaching kids every day.
A week or so ago, I returned from the CEGSA (Computer Education Group of South Australia) conference in Adelaide where I had the great pleasure of giving one of the keynote addresses. I got to meet so many wonderful, dedicated educators who were there giving up two days of their holidays to come and learn more about technology and how it can be effectively used it with their students.
The people I met at CEGSA are already the "believers" however. They were attending the conference, presumably, because they already understand the important role that technology is playing in education. They are probably the people that get looked up to in their schools as the "geeks" (in a good way) and are the people that others turn to when answers about technology are needed. And yet, I can't help but see that there is still a wide gap in skills and understanding between even the group that turned up at CEGSA. I hope that if any of them read this they don't take it the wrong way, but I was a little surprised that even this group was so unconnected in so many ways. A quick show of hands, while hardly a scientific way to measure, indicated that there was a surprisingly small number of those who blogged, used Twitter, or understood the use of basic Web 2.0 resources like Flickr or del.icio.us. I'm incredibly glad they were there, but I was a little surprised because I've come to take so many of these things for granted and sometimes find it hard to get my head around how other educators can possibly not be tapped into this stuff.
So on the one hand, I'm a little surprised that the level of connectedness -the Web 2.0ishness - was so minimal in this particular group. On the other hand, I'm unbelievably excited that so many teachers are wanting to find out more about this stuff, to move to that next level for their own personal understanding and growth in the use of ICT.
What scares me a little are those on the other side... the vast majority of the teaching profession who have never been to a conference like this. The ones that will turn up to school on Monday and either not make any real attempt to create a technology-rich environment for their students, or who still think that PowerPoint is pretty cool. Our schools are full of teachers - many of whom are outstanding educators with enormous passion and energy - but who do not understand the pivotal role that technology plays in the lives of their students.
I think what often shocks me the most about teachers who don't take technology very seriously, is just how far behind they really are. They don't have any idea just how out of touch they are with the kids they teach each day... kids who in most cases are far too polite to say anything about their teachers' lack of technology understanding. But trust me, they know who you are...
Some of the classic excuses for why some teachers don't integrate technology might include the following... how many have you heard before?
- "Im retiring in a couple of years anyway" (yes, but your students are not)
- "I'm too old to learn this stuff"
- "I'm too busy, I don't have the time"
- "I have too much content to get through" (this one is usually followed by "you just don't know what it's like"... ah, yes, I do.)
- "I don't really like computers" (you don't have to like them, you just have to use them)
- "I just don't understand technology" (as though they think no one has noticed that yet)
The scary thing is not the folk that turn up to an event like CEGSA in order to learn more to move ahead. My hat is off to them.
And the scary thing is not even those folk who resist that progress because they don't get it or don't want to get it..
No, the scary thing to me is not the particular characteristics of these two groups, but rather the huge divide that is being created between them and the impact it is having our profession. It is the new Digital Divide.
We used to talk a lot about a "Digital Divide". Usually we were referring to the inequitable technology gap between the rich and the poor, the "information-haves" and the "information-have-nots". But I think I'm getting rather more concerned about the widening gap between the "information-wills" and the "information-will-nots".
There is a group - and a relatively small group at that - who are extremely active in the edtech community. I won't mention names, but if you're a blog reader you probably know who they are. The educators that ARE connected, networked and wired. The ones who really get it. They blog, they tweet, they podcast, they wiki. They store their bookmarks in del.icio.us and their photos in Flickr. They know their way around Second Life and belong to numerous online communities. They get excited by Flips, iPods and IWBs. They'd rather have a Flashmeeting than a staff meeting. To the rest of the world they are freakily geeky, but they are at home in the digital world inhabited by their students, regardless of whether they are native to it or not.
Then there is the other group. Those who still don't get it. They still think that textbooks are the definitive source of learning. They never turn on the interactive whiteboard in their room. They don't have a presence on the web, and they wouldn't know how to Google it if they did. Their idea of technology integration is to "research it on the Internet" and the "get the kids to make a PowerPoint". They either can't see the point of technology at all, or they have almost no real understanding of how technology can be embedded into their classroom. They just. don't. get it.
A new Digital Divide is emerging as the connected educators find each other. A few years ago, these bleeding edge edutechies were the exception. They were isolated in their schools. They did great things with kids but worked mostly in a vacuum because they were so rare that there was usually no one in the school to share their craziness with. But the rise of networked intelligence has changed that. These people are finding each other and forming alliances. They are conversing and sharing with each other. Their networks are amplifying their voices, and allowing them to connect in ways that their less connected colleagues don't really understand, and through this connected amplification, they are starting to have a real voice. There has been a lot of talk for a long time about the need for schools to shift their thinking, to bring themselves into the 21st century where their students live. But that talk has been largely dispersed across disconnected individuals who were unable to have any collective voice.
In the last 18 months or so, I've been noticing that these disconnected individuals are starting to band together, connect much more strongly with each other through the social networks Their voices are getting louder and they are encouraging each other with their sense of community, sharing and openness, and as they bring their collective voices together it is throwing the gap between them and the laggards into sharp relief. This widening void between the "wills" and the "will-nots" is, I think, changing the game a little.
Paradoxically, the "will-nots" main fear is usually expressed as a concern that they will lose control over their students. A fear that if they even consider dipping their toes into the waters of educational technology that their students might realise they really don't have all the answers. They resist technology because they think that to try (and fail) will expose this weaknesses to their students, but they fail to understand that by NOT trying it they are doing far more to expose their weaknesses anyway. It must be hard for a 21st century student to respect a teacher who steadfastly refuses to get with the program.
That's not to say that these people are bad teachers. Sometimes they are exceptionally good teachers who relate to the kids in lots of other ways that have nothing to do with technology at all. But as long as they refuse to come to terms with technology in any sort of meaningful way they will always have this digital divide between them and the natives that makes them just that little bit less effective than they could be.
If you're in the middle of this divide and trying to cross it, you know how much work it takes. But it has to be crossed eventually, and the best time to do it is before it becomes uncrossably wide.
Image: 'Slam: I <3 Public Libraries - The+internet+is+closed'http://www.flickr.com/photos/22929959@N00/2848310955
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Has Social Networking become the New Society
In light of my recent post about living the moment rather than being consumed with documenting it, I was interested to come across this post by Joel Adkins. Joel is musing about the idea of "Twitterati", a class of edubloggers who seem to approach their attendance at conferences as though they were getting an inside scoop on breaking news. He raises some great questions aimed at the very same issues I was thinking about.
Along the same lines, I stumbled across this article that talks about how, when attending a conference, it would be nice if the presenters would make a greater effort to be "in the moment" with the audience in front of them, rather than being so concerned with how to share that moment with others who aren't.
I think Joel hit the nail fair on the head when he posed the question "Has Social Networking become the New Society?"
I think I'm as connected as the next person when it comes to having a finger on the pulse of the online world. Just like many of the people reading this blog, I spend considerable chunks of my day connecting with others using digital tools. Between email, Twitter, Google Reader and a confusing array of social networking sites, I can be continually connected to the conversation if I choose to. I can tap into the constant stream of edu-techno-babble on any of my 4 computers, my iPod touch or my mobile phone. I can send a Tweet, check an email, browse through Google and upload to Flickr from just about anywhere at just about anytime. And although I will continue to do so, and I consider it an important literacy to be fluent in that digital environment, I'm also coming to understand that part of being digitally literate is also knowing when NOT to use it. Just because we can do something, doesn't mean that we should be.
There seems to be an ever-expanding collection of social networking environments that I dip my toe into just to see what they are about... but the more I do so, the more I wonder why. At the moment, I belong to a ridiculous number of dedicated social networking sites like Facebook, PlaxoPulse and LinkedIn, as well as being part of the built-in social networks within services like Flickr, Diigo, del.icio.us and so on. Then of course there is Twitter (when it's working!) and the several mailing lists and online communities I belong to. Oh, don't forget the dozen or so Ning groups I'm a member of and the associated social networks that accompany them. Many of these networks contain the same people. I get "friend" requests from people I've never heard of.
And I'm starting to wonder how many social networks is too many? Has, as Joel asked, social networking become my new society? (The funny thing is that the one social network that really hasn't grown much lately is my real life social network... how sad does that sound?)
At the moment, I'm preparing a keynote presentation for next Thursday at the CEGSA conference in Adelaide. Titled "Learning is a Conversation", it was going to be about how educators can use these tools of connectivity and how we can be part of a true lifelong-learning environment by using those tools to engage in the ongoing conversation taking place around us. But I've been thinking a lot lately about the balance we need to find in our lives as we take part in those conversations.
Don't get me wrong, I think that this ongoing conversation is incredibly important to be a part of and I can't imagine being disconnected from it. The endless stream of emails, tweets and blogposts, although sometimes a little overwhelming, is certainly an important part of what I need to grow as an educator and to keep challenging my thinking. What I am finding however, is that I need to temper it against the need to live in the moment and enjoy the real face to face time. I don't really need to send Tweets every few minutes or blog four times a day. I want to know about all the new Web 2.0 tools out there, but I'm realising that I don't need to commit to every single one of them. It's OK to clear my feed reader every so often if it's obvious no way I'll ever get through looking at it all, and it's OK not to be there for every single live event taking place on the Web right now.
When Al Upton originally invited me to speak at the conference, I planned to do all sorts of geeky techno stuff for my presentation, which was, after all, about engaging with the global conversation. I had thoughts of running live backchannels, sending live streams to the web, using Twitter to bring a global audience into the room and so on, and while those things might be fun to do and may expose some of the technologies to people that don't know much about them, I'm reconsidering just how much extra value they will bring to the whole thing. Yes, I might UStream it if I can do it unobtrusively, and yes I'll probably record it just in case I want to podcast parts of it later, and yes I'll probably demonstrate a few useful connective technologies like Skype and Twitter, but I also want to focus on really being there and talking to the living, breathing human beings in the room.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm getting older, or just growing up.
Tags: conference, cegsa, socialnetworking, etiquette
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