News for the Week of November 16, 2008
A recent tech-education news story indicates where our children's classroom experience is headed. Because technology can help bring school more into sync with the rest of kids' lives, developments like the following are really pretty exciting...
Window on education's future
Just as young people's social lives have both online and offline components, so increasingly do their academic lives. Certainly educators are incorporating more and more online and offline tech tools - email, blogs, social networks, and wikis - into class and home work. What's happening is that the use of those tools will get more and more fluid, media-rich, and supportive of the offline parts of schoolwork.
In fact, online tools - such as the "collaboratory" created by author and (Stanford and U. of Cal., Berkeley) professor Howard Rheingold - will make the classroom part of education more meaningful to teachers and students. The current "firewall" between the way academic work is conducted and the way "Real Life" is lived will collapse as tools used in young people's RL become part of school. School will gain relevance to fluent young information "hunter-gatherers," as MIT professor Henry Jenkins describes them in his book Convergence Culture.
The 'collaboratory'
Rheingold has launched his Social Media Classroom, a free, easy-to-use "browser-based environment" for digital and real-life collaboration that includes learning tools such as a wiki (for collective writing/editing), blog with commenting, forum (boards or many-to-many discussion), chat, microblog (like Twitter), RSS (newsfeed/online distribution), social bookmarks (collective bookmarking), photos, video, etc. All it needs is virtual-world avatars (like those in Lively or Second Life)! As the winner of a MacArthur Foundation HASTAC award, the Classroom's designed "to supplement, not replace, existing course and learning management systems" and - more importantly, I think, to help teachers go beyond teaching digital tools and skills to teaching history, literature, citizenship with the tools in a way that makes learning these subjects more immersive and compelling (because of the role-playing and collaboration the tools allow). Whew! That was a mouthful, but there you have insights into education's future prospects. Now all we need is to move it all into a virtual world (or at least turn the chat feature into avatar chat in rooms as customizable as real-world classrooms).
Here is Rheingold's own video introduction of the Social Media Classroom, and here's info on the HASTAC competition (the acronym stands for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory).
In other news...
- AG's concern about age verification. One of the unintended consequences of the age verification 49 state attorneys general are calling for concern targeted marketing to kids, the New York Times reports. What the headline refers to is the alleged business model of some of the 2 dozen+ companies who want to help (and involve US schools in helping) verify American children's ages - they say for the purpose of protecting them online but also reportedly to make a business out of selling data they gather on kids to marketers. Kids' social sites, virtual worlds, and other services would pay the age-verification vendor a "commission for each [child] member" a school signs up; "the [kids'] Web site can then use the data on each child to tailor its advertising," the Times reports. One of the age-verification companies the Times talked to, eGuardian, says kids are exposed to ads anyway (well, in some, not all, kids' sites), it just makes sure they're appropriate. The question is, how can that "appropriate advertising" be guaranteed? There's a pretty sexualized media culture and a lot of obesity in this society anyway, to name only a couple of issues. One of the remarkable things about this piece is the quote at the bottom from Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a leading proponent of age verification, saying that verifying kids' ages online to promote marketing to them would be very concerning. This is the first qualifying statement about age verification we've seen from the attorneys general since they started calling for its implementation more than two years ago.
- Key week for bullying awareness. Bullying needs to be detected and addressed early! "By age 24, 60% of identified bullies have a criminal conviction. Young children who were labeled by their peers as bullies required more support form adults from government agencies, had more court convictions, more alcoholism, more anti-social personality disorders and used more mental health services," according to research by psychology professor Debra Pepler at York University (here's a sample of her work. That's just one of a group of statistics - some disturbing, some calls to action - that Bill Belsey pulled together and distributed to mark this week, Canada's sixth-annual Bullying Awareness Week. A parent and teacher too, Bill is founder of the award-winning Bullying.org and Cyberbullying.ca. Here are some other eye-opening numbers: * Bullying occurs in school playgrounds every 7 minutes and once every 25 minutes in class. * 85% of bullying episodes occur in the context of a peer group. * Bullying usually stops in less than 10 seconds when peers intervene on behalf of the victim. * 25% of kids children say teachers intervene in bullying situations, while 70% of teachers believe they always intervene. * Bullying is reduced in schools where principals are committed to reducing bullying.
- Mobile game ratings. The people who brought you videogame ratings - the Entertainment Software Rating Board - are making them a little more useful to parents. They've created a mobile ratings site for cellphones (http://m.esrb.org), CNET reports. So parents can now access a rating even at point-of-purchase, when pressure from those kid gamers can be intense and a little right info at the fingertips can help. Both the mobile site and the regular Web one also have rating summaries. "The idea," according to CNET, "is to allow parents to see some of the thought process behind the agency's decision" for each game - "the context and relevant content that factored into a game's ESRB rating assignment." The summaries will soon be available for all new games, as well as those rated since July 1. Meanwhile, USATODAY reports that, despite the tough economic times, it could be a record year for videogame sales.
- Not actually 'extreme teens'. This bit of pop anthropology in the Financial Times may interest parents: a university student telling an older friend how glad she is not to be a teenager these days. With social-network sites and services, she says, teens are on display 24/7. Sure, they put themselves in that position, but there's a great deal of pressure on them to, she suggests. They not only have to project an image but also protect it by being one-man or one-woman, always-on "PR machines" while also dealing with schoolwork, homework, sports and other extracurriculars, sometimes jobs, etc. "It's driving them all crazy," she told her friend, adding that this is normal. This isn't just "popular kids." But here's what I think everybody (teens, parents, educators, psychologists, etc.) needs to think together about going forward: "And there are so many casualties and nobody talks about it." The casualties of these new norms. And "casualties" doesn't necessarily mean drop-outs from this reality, but whatever impact it has, day-to-day, on young people's emotional and social well-being.
