More Facebook: Why are you surprised?

Something else that has caught my eye of late is the press covering the astonishing fact that students and their parents bad-mouth teachers on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.  I’m not sure when “rock-star popularity among youth” became part of the teaching job description, but the idea that this is “news” struck me as kind of amusing.

When my kids were toddlers I used to hear other parents complain about the fact that three-year-olds (and maybe even – gasp – their own three year old) tended to pee in swimming pools, and that fact diminished their enjoyment of the pool.  This phenomenon lead to my Personal Parenting Rule #47: Don’t swim where toddlers swim.

I love Facebook.  I have gobs of Friends who were high school classmates and whom I haven’t seen since, people whom I see maybe once a year if I’m lucky, and regular friends I see daily who need to coordinate a meet-up.  Also in there are a few kids who are friends of my kids, athletes my wife coaches, etc.  They exist in a group called “Kids,” and they do NOT participate in my Facebook life, though they can contact me through Facebook if they need to.

When I was first playing with Facebook, I allowed myself the ability to see former students’ status posts.  They hated and dissed some of their teachers, some of them my friends, so I changed my settings to exclude their status updates from my Facebook life.  This was their emotional space, not mine.

I remember my earliest teaching days when I thought I was a “friend” to some of my students, when I could secretly claim to belong to their generation, and when I said “we” in class, I felt like I was including them as peers at some level.  With 20/20 hindsight, what was I?  Role model & mentor?  Yes.  Trusted adviser?  Often.  Beloved teacher?  Occasionally.  Peer?  No.  Friend?  Never.

Stay out of your students’ social lives.  If they or their parents publish lies about you such that your career/reputation is being harmed, the same remedy applies: sue them.  Written defamation is libel, and teachers are not considered “public figures”; you are not a rock star.  Your principal is, however.  But know that if you share the conversation in which you are being libeled, your claim to having been damaged by their speech would likely be much weaker.

Know that just as three-year-olds pee in the pool, teenagers get unreasonably angry and verbally abusive, with parents often close behind them.  That’s why there are kiddie pools, and that’s why you don’t share your Facebook life with students.

Of Sasquatch and Schools

Pretty universally, educators find themselves kvetching about parents who believe that because they went to school they are experts on education.  You know, like how dare they?  Why, after all the years of professional preparation, graduate degrees and credentials, not to mention the years of classroom experience, are we to suffer this presumption?

Like all good myths, including mermaids, Sasquatch, leprechauns and fairies, this one also fails to die because it has deep roots in illusion and history.

In the year 1800, our culture was agrarian.  90% of the population was involved in farming, growing our food, thus 90% (and probably more) of the kids grew up on farms worked by very tired parents and older children.  Before the organization of schooling, children learned from their parents – mostly moms – and the learning goals were to serve the task of farming and furthering the solidarity of the farming community, and in cities the goal was to succeed in some delimited trade, but still based on elementary reading and calculating skills.  As schools became organized in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the role of teacher shifted to mostly young unmarried women (powerless and predictable entities) who could be counted upon to instill these values in the hearts and minds of farm children.

The illusion here was that children were being taught by surrogate parents, in loco parentis, by the “controllable” teacher in the one-room schoolhouse overseen by the “educated class,” the local (male) mayor or preacher.  The reality was these farm kids were being taught by energetic adolescent and single young women who not only taught the 3-Rs, but also imparted a vision unique to the American frontier, one of achievement, great energy, and self-determination.  By the 1870s, Susan B. Anthony was fighting to bring to 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, and young women across the country were changing the face of the nation, their 41-year struggle ending finally in 1920.

Illusions aside, the fact remains these farmer parents paid these young teachers to teach their children as they themselves would be teaching them.  School was exclusively an authorized extension of parenting.  While the reality was undoubtedly much greater than this, the core parental assumption was that education was bounded by parental life experience.  Only.  This worldview is one we share with our parents and their parents’ parents, and it is only the “educator class” by means of professional inculcation and experience, which has learned that education is much more than a simple academic cloning of our students’ parents.

Today, a parent’s life experience includes his and her own personal experience with schooling.  They are to be forgiven for thinking schooling is still exclusively an extension of parenting.  All myths are etched into our psyches by the greater culture, for better or worse.  In our case, knowing the task at hand is much more complex than that, it is most certainly for the worse.  While parents head for work in highly networked, creative, tech-infused environments, when doing their best to represent their children’s welfare they find themselves uttering words like “Pencil and paper worked great for me when I was in school, so they’re good enough for my child.”  Pencil and paper, when polls suggest 84% of American workers need to use their computers at work. These parental attitudes toward schooling reflects perception grounded solely in myth, obviously having no relationship whatsoever to their daily workaday experience.  Today’s workplace is all about change and facile evolution of skillsets, quite different from an earlier core mandate of stability and social compliance.

While teachers today still participate in the parenting function simply because they are tasked with controlling the days of increasing numbers of young people, the days of bringing children to adulthood capable of living their parents’ lives is today considered failure in most educators’ eyes.  Our task now is to prepare children for a future in which we cannot describe the professions for which they are preparing.  This is crazy talk, right?

Maybe, but it’s a form of craziness our students have fully embraced, and they are not waiting around for our school systems to catch up.  The greater culture, the modern equivalent of the adolescent school teacher with a revolutionary heart, is feeding our students a vision of the future that is quite unlike anything the traditional school system is prepared to provide.

Out of simple self-preservation we adults who run our schools (and send our children to them) need to clear the dust of years from our eyes and see the future through the eyes of our students.   It has been some years since ed technologists formulated the task before us through the ISTE NETS standards, but the response from society has been a collective yawn.  Meanwhile, the kids are rocketing past us and finding alternatives to fifty-year-old pedagogy.  If the Pew Internet & American Life Project is indicative of anything at all, it is that students are finding learning and meaning in their digital world despite the educational system’s best efforts to suppress it to keep things comfortable.

Let’s pause and think about what we really mean when we say we “educate the future.”  Are we really?

The Edmodo alternative to commercial social media

In future posts I will be dwelling on the instructional wonders of Edmodo, but since I just put a lot of energy into bagging on the use of Facebook by K-12 teachers for instruction, it’s only fair to consider Edmodo as a ready alternative.  Using the same set of structural criteria I used in my critique of Facebook, let’s take a look at Edmodo…

Teachers are responsible for what occurs in their teaching environment.  Edmodo class pages, or groups, are occupied by invitation only via a code to enable a connection.  Any student signing up by alias can be summarily deleted, and teachers can switch signup codes or close enrollment to groups at any time.  Teachers may also enforce norms by deletion of comments made, and can guide student participation through any number of management strategies, just as in a FTF classroom.  If a teacher needs to step away from supervision for an extended period, or if certain group members are bent on disruption or abuse, comments can be fully moderated, reviewed by the teacher before posting to the group and effectively closing the page to spontaneous posting.  Since email accounts are not required for enrollment nor is there a chat function, the teacher cannot be held accountable for any back-channel interaction outside of Edmodo.  It is a non-public walled garden, always subject to teacher management.

Individual interactions between students and teachers must be above suspicion and reproach, with guidelines provided by law and a clear code of professional conduct.  All interactions between the teacher and group members are visible to the entire group and any administrator included in the Edmodo environment (if the account lives in a district subdomain).  The only exception to this rule is any comment held for moderation if the teacher has enabled that feature.  As noted above, there is no back-channel or private space for conversations in Edmodo as one would find in Facebook or Second life.

Teachers need to be able to design the learning environment to optimize learning.  While the esthetic of Edmodo is clean and certainly Facebook-esque, it is free of advertising widgets, game apps, and endless appeals to extend your Friends list through a daunting web of connectivity.  Edmodo functions as a means for groups large and small to interact on tasks.  Yes, casual and off-topic discussion is fully available and enjoyable, but they are still subject to teacher-set norms.  While Edmodo is an optimal vehicle for conducting project-based learning with its tools designed to support it, teachers can create a learning space that supports their personal teaching methods and goals through the use of polls, narrative feedback, small group assignments, etc.  Each class can have its own customized resource library, and students have a waiting depository for assignments.

Parents have the right to access the learning environment taxpayer-paid teachers provide.  Parents who wish to review their child’s activity on Edmodo can be issued an account that gives them access to what their child and their child’s teacher posts in Edmodo.  This account is special, in that they do not participate in the group, they are not visible to other group members or to their child, and they cannot see the posts or work products of other students.  They also have access to their child’s assignments and any grades maintained in the Edmodo gradebook application if the teacher uses it.  Unlike with Facebook, parent access is not dependent on any action taken by their child, being fully teacher-managed.

Teachers need to be able to provide a record of interactions they supervise.  While the necessity of maintaining physical or electronic records of all Edmodo class interactions is debatable, depending on district or teacher personal records policy, a teacher can elect to save all Edmodo pages as HTML files, a record far more complete than is possible in any FTF environment.  Also, students have no control over the fate of their posts.  Once posted, posts remain until removed by the teacher.  Should a teacher require evidence of misbehavior such as bullying or threats, s/he need only make a copy of the page to use in the course dealing with the situation prior to removing such post from the live group process.

Above I alluded to administrators and district subdomains.  It is the case that most teachers using Edmodo today do so through independent accounts established through Edmodo.com.  However, many teachers who wish to involve their colleagues in professional learning communities often seek the support of instructional leaders as they share their expertise, requesting that Edmodo create subdomains which are occupied only by the school sites and teachers of their school district.  Not only does this extend professional networking capabilities, it provides for backup in the event of an emergency.  Edmodo site administrators (which could be a colleague as well as a building administrator) can pop into your account and turn off active posting in an unexpected absence, and just as in FTF classroom supervision, administrators who can attest to the quality of the content of your online learning environment can have your back in the event of an issue.  Edmodo district administrators can create new groups alongside district school sites to serve as spaces for colleagues to network and conduct district-wide professional development activities.

Teachers on Facebook: Professional Roulette

The use of Facebook by teachers has become such a deeply felt and inflammatory topic during this time of budgetary hemorrhage – Facebook is powerful and free, after all – that I felt it high time it was addressed from the practitioner perspective.

Now, before you dismiss this out of hand after deciding I’m just another set of bureaucratic flapping gums, allow me the following bona fide:  At the outset of my teaching career as a high school teacher, my district strongly advised teachers to unlist their phone numbers from the public phone book lest we subject ourselves to crank calls and toilet papered houses.  I ignored this directive, as I was the kind of teacher who took my relationship to my students beyond what happened in front of the chalk board, providing mentoring and adult friendship to those kids who needed it.  My phone was used by students only to report crises, their own or another students’, and that access prevented at least one suicide attempt, and that in my first teaching year alone.  Besides, I’ve always thought of toilet papered houses as loving acts.

So I truly get the vital role teachers play in adolescent lives, a role that goes way beyond content standards.  We dig deeply into our emotions, intellects and bank accounts to serve these young people, and when we find a tool that works in their service, narrowly-cast district policies and even our own self-interest often fade into the background noise of the teaching profession.  We particularly search for avenues to make as vital a connection to our students as we can, knowing in our gut that learning happens best in the context of emotion and relationship to peers and mentors.

The dynamic and immediate interactivity of Facebook makes it a natural medium for teachers, and the web is full of teachers extolling its power and virtue.  However, and this is a pleading however, Facebook provides a quality of access to a student’s personal life and actions that can be truly career-ending for a teacher.  All your caring and expertise will matter little if you find yourself outside looking in following the trauma of a communication nightmare.

The organizational intricacies that contribute to the teacher’s ability to walk into a room, turn on the lights, have minor children walk in and face an expectation imposed on them by parents and wider culture are not random circumstances.  Your ability to teach that class is the outcome of a long and complex political and social process, and imbedded in that process are certain conditional facts driven by law.

Facebook fails you as a teacher because it ignores the following conditions imposed by the structure that provides for public schooling:

• Teachers are responsible for what occurs in their teaching environment.  When teachers set up a space in which to conduct instruction, whether it is their classroom, on the grass under a tree at the park down the street, or a page on Facebook, they assume responsibility for words uttered there.  It is expected that in the course of instruction and interaction that you are present at all times.  Facebook is a public space, and by definition it is free of structural supervision. If a teacher cannot actively supervise student interaction in a space the teacher uses for instruction, the space should not be available to students.  This is a no-brainer when we’re using a brick & mortar classroom; we carry keys.  In our professional role, social media is no different, but Facebook has no keys to distribute.

• Individual interactions between students and teachers must be above suspicion and reproach, with guidelines provided by law and a clear code of professional conduct.  We have all had students with whom we should not meet with alone, with private conversations occurring with a door open to the hallway. We have also all had students who seriously misinterpreted our words leading to uncomfortable confrontations, extending eventually to their parents.  Facebook provides a necessarily private, “windowless” space for such interactions, and it is only a matter of time before things will go wrong and a teacher finds him or herself in desperate defensive mode.

• Teachers need to be able to design the learning environment to optimize learning.  Instruction on a Facebook page is like gathering your class in the middle of Time’s Square before NYC got rid of the strip joints.  While you think you are interacting as teacher, students are chatting, the ads are rolling (marketed specifically to each student’s “Likes”), and they’re checking out your FB profile page.

• Parents have the right to access the learning environment taxpayer-paid teachers provide.  It is the rare adolescent who “Friends” a parent.  Even rarer is the parent who provides a computer conditional on being their child’s Facebook Friend, and even then kids respond by maintaining separate “parent-safe” pages.  Consequently, when teaching happens on Facebook parents are structurally denied access to an environment they are indirectly paying the teacher to provide.

• Teachers need to be able to provide a record of interactions they supervise.  By “supervise” I mean providing any learning environment that is part of a teacher’s professional role.  Once provided, under the law, supervision is assumed.  If students control the permanence of communications by being able to delete their posts, nothing short of a court order (good luck with that) can recover any toxic, threatening, libelous or injurious communication posted by a student.  Also, given the miracle of Photoshop, there is nothing short of a court order that can disprove a created private conversation between student and teacher.

So what’s a teacher to do?  In my next post I look at how Edmodo addresses these very issues.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Hawking

The press is full of news of the 70th birthday of Dr. Stephen Hawking on January 8th, including Discover magazine’s coverage of how he could have lived so long with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Not that I feel he needs me to add to his accolades, but I do have a favorite “Hawking Moment” of my own that continues to inform me professionally, and indeed how I live my life.

In an earlier post here I promoted the book, Transforming School Culture by Anthony Muhammad.  In that post I described my encounter with Dr. Hawking thusly:

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Some years ago (I think it was 2003), the UC Davis Cosmology Group invited Stephen Hawking to present a recent paper, and as luck would have it, one of my 5^th grade students that year was the son of one of the cosmology faculty who had extended the invitation to Dr. Hawking, and I was politely invited to join the physicists for lunch with him. Yes, as an amateur astronomer I was thrilled to sit at the master’s feet, and he said a great many things of great complexity and importance during his public lectures.

But to this lunchtime crowd of mostly his peers, the one thing he said I will never forget was, and I paraphrase here: Forget everything you think you know.  Be like a child and receive the new data as if you were just born.  Easy for you to say, you might think.  Well, nothing is easy for Stephen Hawking to say, and he challenged his colleagues to engage in a personal dogma dump so they might comprehend the meaning of the new astrophysical data emerging at a fantastic rate.  He encouraged them to let go of everything they thought they knew about the universe.

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So, Dr. Hawking, thank you for encouraging the dogma dump, that we might regard our world and our roles in it afresh as the data informs and change remains our ever-present companion.  We are all the better for it.

Gaming to save the world. Not kidding.

Last September brought us the news that the online game Foldit had produced actual real-world solutions to a biochemical puzzle, leading to advances in medical research, specifically in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. The news of the discovery was good, but the fact that it was brought to us courtesy of the gaming culture those of my generation have long feared and disparaged was the real earth-shaker here.

Jane McGonagal, Ph.D., takes this news to the next level, and we need to pay attention.  For my entire professional career I’ve begged my students to become participants in the salvation of their deeply at-risk world.  With a number of stunning exceptions to the rule, for the most part the response has been, “Uh huh, let me get back to my X-box if you don’t mind, Mr. Storm.” For me, and most of us, this channeling of our brightest minds into (what we perceived as) mindless gaming was ample cause for despair, portending no less the end of civilization and perhaps the species.

In this TED talk linked below and in her book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Dr. McGonagal sees not only hope, but cause for actual excitement arising from this enormous body of talent and passion growing from the gaming culture.  Have a listen, and see if you don’t find yourself allowing for the possibility she just may be onto something.

Cathy Davidson

Educators with an affinity for technology and living in the 21st Century with an inclination to thinking about the future, find common purpose whenever someone begins a rant about education going about its business the wrong way.  We have a sense that instruction needs to incorporate the abilities and sensibilities of the networked digital students in our classrooms, and we can point to growing evidence that traditional lecture drill & kill instructional models are damaging our collective futures.  We know this grasping at traditional pedagogy is not only rendering our education systems ineffective, but perhaps utterly irrelevant to the degree its practitioners and administrators ignore the changes in how information molds our culture and its youth.

Yesterday I attended a UC Davis Chancellor’s Colloquium featuring a meta-thinker who is providing clarity on the science of precisely why education needs to massively reconfigure its practice in order to succeed at its task.

Cathy N. Davidson of Duke University has written the book Now You See It: How the brain science of attention will transform the way we live, work, and learn.  As codirector of the HASTAC Collaboratory , Cathy has drawn upon the collective knowledge of brain scientists, psychologists, educators, technologists, management scientists and more (from the book jacket) not specifically to offer “The Solution” to all our ills, but get us talking and thinking in dynamic ways; talking to each other and thinking out loud together to develop real solutions to real problems in evidence in the misalignments between education and culture.  Read more about HASTAC.

You can watch this 2008 video of Cathy Davidson here, or you can wait for the video of yesterday’s presentation.

Another excellent opportunity to hear her is featured in Duke University’s Office Hours, where she takes questions on Learning in a Digital Age.

I highly recommend making her work a frequent stop in your learning journey, either by reading her excellent book (seen here signing my copy) or following her blog .  It was with great pleasure that I add her to my link set of Necessary Thinkers on this page, as no one better fits that descriptor.

Occasionally I hate when I’m right

Quote from a recent BBC News article on global (and particularly South Korean) educational technology:

“President Barack Obama’s “Digital Promise”, announced last month, involves a new national centre to advance technologies that can supposedly transform teaching and learning… Given the way education in the US is so highly devolved there are bound to be continuing questions over how much the initiative can achieve.”

Ouch.  That word: devolved, really hit me where it hurts.  Why? because I’ve used it on this blog before, though this BBC reporter has added the even more damning adjective, highly.  It has long seemed that while the rest of the developed world invests mightily in its future (the kids), bringing to bear the best technology and practices our innovations and research have to offer, voters in the US have driven the political system into a death spiral of complacency.

So here we have an article, written by the British press, peering into our house and perceiving its condition the same way I do, though part of me has long hoped that the decline I have witnessed is relatively insignificant compared to what our politicians would have us believe is our fundamental, God-given, inevitable superiority.

So am I merely cynical, or is this an accurate representation of what American education has become and  will be for generations to come?

Interactive White Boards: Tool or Toy?

Yesterday brought a blog post by the Skunk, What makes an interactive white board interactive?, prompting my reply below.  I am a huge proponent of IWBs, though the financial and physical implementation of them is merely the beginning of what is required to make them an effective tool for 21st century instruction.

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I’ve always seen IWBs as the critical bridge between a generation of digital natives and their teachers, who remain largely comprised of digital immigrants. New teachers who are also digital natives are much more attuned to the value of interactive, project-based learning environments, though their employers rarely give them the opportunity to practice teaching that way.

Internet-connected IWBs provide the training wheels to bring teachers into a much more interactive mode of “instruction,” providing a rich digital resource that can be shared as a class. The key to knowing whether IWBs are being used effectively is imbedded in the term “shared.” If a teacher manages the technology such that students are regularly creating meaning using the IWB (and/or related response systems for checking for understanding), then it is being used effectively. If the IWB is a jazzed up presentation tool used exclusively by the teacher, the teacher will realize a certain bump in their students’ level of engagement in the short term, but they will not be using the full power of the tool.

Effective IWB professional development focuses on guiding teachers through these stages of understanding the meaning of “learning through interaction.” It is not about students seeing or holding technological “things,” but having human interaction in a learning environment made more dynamic and rich with the aid of digital tools. In 1:1 classroom computing environments, facilitated by a teacher who understands 21st century learning dynamics, the IWB is completely unnecessary, because the interaction and consequent learning is happening between students with access to 21st century tools.

Egypt on the rise

Last Spring a young Egyptian woman, Mona, contacted me in her effort to visit K-12 classes while she studied at UC Berkeley for the summer, wishing to see our use of technology in our classrooms.  There were logistical difficulties owing to our now very limited summer school offerings, but we managed to set up some class visits for her at a couple of our sites including our charter New Tech Network high school, Da Vinci Academy.

Regrettably I was unable to meet Mona due to my own summer travels, but she apparently left grateful for the time she was able to spend with us.  On my desk this morning I found an envelope with a keychain, the fob pictured here.  In a subsequent email exchange, she called it a “humble gift,” though while perhaps humble, I found it moving and deeply thought-provoking.

I have referred to recent events in the “Arab Spring” in previous posts to this blog, and Mona’s visit has brought those events even closer to my professional world view.

On numerous occasions throughout my career, I have been visited by international teams of educators, mostly from Asia, intent on learning how it is we Americans do what we do.  These were nations that were building infrastructure and slowly growing their social systems, rethinking how education should be done, and reaching for ideas.  If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice the citizens of Singapore, Shanghai, and South Korea haven’t done so badly for themselves over the past twenty years.  Now the visits and learning are traveling from the West to the East as we grapple with our own value systems and the defunding of education.

Egypt and other Arab countries on the distant other hand, rather than slowly developing a system, are in a head-long charge to remake their societies.  In London and Philadelphia young people use Facebook and Twitter to vandalize their neighborhoods out of boredom and general adolescent disgust with authorities.  In Cairo and Alexandria, young people are using these technologies to remake their world into something meaningful, changing governments, lighting their way to the future.

I have found myself increasingly envious of Mona as an educator in Egypt.  To be an technology-oriented educator in a country that is hungry for relevance, powered by people impassioned by a vision of the future that provides a world in which they want their grandchildren to prosper would be a dream.

Perhaps if we in America can look abroad for these examples of people looking beyond their personal and immediate comfort and affluence to focus on the future they are creating, we may avoid international irrelevance.