Is social Media disruptive in the classroom?

African Education Week, held in Johannesburg every year is the largest education conference on the continent.  This year, I was asked to give a short presentation and then take part in a panel discussion around the use of the social web in the classroom. The text of my presentation is below (and thanks to Ollie Bray for the idea of using the change slides from Karl Fisch ).

Is social media disruptive in the classroom? Yes…of course it is,and this is a good thing we need to embrace and nurture

When I was preparing for today’s session, I thought for a little while on the meaning, in today’s context, of the word ‘disruptive’. Now, it can of course mean disruptive to classroom learning, or disruptive in the sense we understand by the term ‘Disruptive Technology’. But actually, both need to be contextualised in a positive way because they can be one and the same thing.  

In Scotland they have had a national schools intranet since 2006. It was the first national intranet for schools in the world and…. It never really worked properly, at least,in the way teachers would have wanted it to work. It was in my personal view, almost out of date before it was actually rolled out….seriously.  I’ve just spent the past year or as a part of a small advisory group set up to examine and report on the options for it’s replacement. We've spent a lot of time trying to design something which is based upon Self organised learning, and the social web, and is as future proof as possible.

But the biggest challenge to the whole project from it’s inception back in the early noughties to the present day has probably,if we’re honest, not been the intranet,or the idea of an intranet,  but rather has been resistance to change..from educators mainly.   The kids are all saying come on…bring it on…no problems fromtheir perspective.In fact, they welcome technology with open arms, embracing it, subverting it, using it for their benefit.It’s the world they live inand it needs to become one we as educators and teachers at least join in and try to become equal partners with the kids in.The balance of power in learning is shifting away from the traditional transmission model of teaching.

Education systems the world over have always had a resistance to change. Anything new or unknown, anything which challenges the current understanding or hierarchy. I bought a few examples of this with me today

Thanks to Ollie Bray for first showing me these slides in one of his presentations a few years ago

So you see….. change has always provoked fear and resistance. But we are living in a world which is going through another revolution. We’ve had the agricultural revolution in the C18, the industrial revolution in the C19, political revolutions in the C20 and now we are in the midst of the information revolution. And this cannot bypass our classrooms as if they were islands in the stream resisting the current of progress. I agree with Steven Heppell when he said that we just spent the whole of the twentieth century perfecting a nineteenth century model of education for the industrial age. I believe that it’s just not fit for purpose anymore – this idea that we can churn out compliant and malleable individuals who will fit into traditional hierarchies without kicking back at all – it’s an absolute nonsense.

Ken Robinson,in a recent TED talk put it this way. He said…  

‘Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. Yes,,, really! They are being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform. From computers, from Smartphones, from advertising hoardings, from 100’s of television and radio channels. And we’re punishing them now for getting distracted.  From what? Boring stuff. At school, for the most part.

Now, most great learning happens in groups. Social media enables this collaboration. If we explode these groups of kids into individual parts we separate them from their natural learning environments.  In school, we tell them there is one answer, and its in the back of the book so don’t look. And don’t copy. In the outside world, this is called collaboration. ( If you’re not familiar with Ken, check him out….on YouTube)

Kids today are ‘Screenagers’ and they are completely comfortable with web 3.0 – the creative web. Many of us are still coming to terms with web 2.0…the consumptive web. There is the real tension. They come into school and we expect them to ‘power down’. Why… Why…why… must they stop communicating and collaborating just because they happen to be confined between four walls *we* call a  *classroom*

Now Sir Ken has more to say

   ’But its not all bad news.. Many countries globally are trying to create classrooms that challenge traditional models and reverse the hierarchy, allow young people to communicate and collaborate, that provide an authentic audience for children’s work’

This is what social media is all about. It’s simply another more culturally relevant tool for facilitating learning.The frightening thing for many teachers is that they can’t control it.  I think this is something we have to help our teachers let go of

Young people are engaged when they are learning about things or with things that they can relate too or that are relevant to them. Social media is highly culturally relevant at the moment for young people and harnessing these tools for education can develop really powerful contexts for learning.

Do you remember that aircraft which took off from La Guardia Airport in New York flew into a flock of birds suffered a double engine loss and glided to safety landing on the Hudson River back in 2009? Those images of Captain Sullenberger the pilot walking on the wings of his 737 guiding his passengers to the safety of waiting boats after pulling of what must truly rank as one of the most spectacular aircraft landings ever. This story hit the world first via twitter before the traditional media channels had got their acts together. Imagine if you’d had this happening during your class? What an amazing learning opportunity?

 So Social media is also highly relevant across society as a whole. For example in the UK in 2012 eight out of the ten most popular search terms were directly linked to a social website. Facebook was the most popular search term. And you tube was the second most popular search engine. Young people today don’t look in books for answers on how to do things if they have a choice…they go to you tube and watch someone actually doing it. Our world is evolving. New ideas will spread the whole way around the world in less than 48 hours. That’s the power of the YouTube video clip!  It’s even less time on Twitter.  Social media is global and ubiquitous. This is evolution, but not as we’ve previously understood the word. Now the term evolution is used to describe changes which occur much more rapidly than Darwin could ever have dreamed about. 

So with this in mind, think about this concept…. I call it  ’Knowledge Grazing’. Just looking at something on line, or searching for something specific takes us on a self organised but still very messy journey through learning. Try going to a Wikipedia page for a topic or subject which interests you. Can you defy the psychology which makes clicking on hyperlinks almost impossible to resist?

This is a heutagogical approach which could see a return to a more focussed and user-centred project- based learning, but this time, with projects directed by the individual learner.  As educators, all we need to do is set the parameters, then work individually with our students, helping, providing advice, and yes, even teaching them that it’s not just ok to recycle and mash up knowledge, but that the real goal is to reboot it, make it work, and truly own it.  By this I mean evaluating what is discovered,  properly crediting the work of others and commenting on how relevant it might be to the project, whilst benchmarking it against the set parameters. We’re not just looking for old-style factual regurgitation. Those days are long gone, left behind by the post industrial information age. We should be in the business of helping learners to become consummate knowledge Rebooters.

It’s not what you know but how you use it. 

So to sum up…yes, social media *IS* disruptive in the classroom

Yes,  it disrupts traditional models of teaching (information transmission)

and honestly, if something is able to be disrupted, than it deserves to be disrupted.

Pedagogy, as we’ve traditionally understood it is being replaced by heutagogy, or Self Directed Learning.

Social Media has re energised learning. We live in the Soundbite generation. Use it, … because I tell you this….. if you dislike the change,  you’ll like the irrelevance even less.

And after all,  as  someone else once said …. aren't the best teachers are those who show students where to look but don’t tell them what to see? 

New kid on the block

Apple has a competitor in the tablet education content arena. But will it be a strong enough offering to take away business from the market leader?

At long last, the there is a new kid on the block. I recently looked at Samsung’s Smart School offering at the African Education Week exhibition. Essentially it’s rather like Apple TV in the way it links a class set of tablets ( Samsung Galaxy) with an eBoard screen and the class teacher who is able to push content and assessment, as well as control activity on each pupil’s tab and show work on the eBoard screen.

Samsung are promising content too. They've hooked up with education publishers to provide this. But there’s a strong emphasis on consumption here. I'm uncomfortable with the apparent lack of creation apps for education.

I guess what I'm asking though is will it be enough to make a dent in Apple’s education business? After all, the iLife content creation suite of tools is outstanding and highly rated by educationalists who use it. Added to this is the content available through iTunesU and the education support service, and you have a pretty unbeatable overall package.

Samsung have made a start in competing with Apple for the lucrative education business. But with the vast majority of schools having iPads rather than Android devices as their ultimate wished-for tablet, they still have a steep hill to climb…

And the folks at the conference who promised to get back to me with some more information still haven't done so yet, Samsung Southern Africa.  Apple would have done so by now....

African Education Week 2013 (pt 2)

Thoughts on African education week -day one session two

I felt rather sorry for the panel chair during this session. Leading education technology expert, Kobus Van Wyk must have felt like he'd been transported back twenty years to an education conference in the last century, such was the appalling standard of presentation. I must qualify this first though, because it would be fair to say that the first and last presentations were fantastic, with Fred Baumhardt of Microsoft giving us a futuristic look at what should soon be everyday use of touch projected technology, and Headteacher Ansie Peens giving us her experiences of a 1:1 tablet roll out programme in her state school.

However, these two fascinating talks bookended three appalling sales pitches from vendors set upon using existing technology to do existing jobs. The future of content provision is not photocopying sections of textbooks for kids who forgot to pack their schoolbooks (I'm not even going to validate the presentation from the photocopying salesperson with a discussion), and neither is it in digitising existing or pimped-up copies of existing textbooks with a few hyperlinks and interacties bolted on. These three sales pitches were poor because they were so misplaced. They add to the very real risk that the potential from increased access to devices in schools via tablet provision will be squandered due to use of downloaded and expensive static texts.

As Microsoft's Fred Baumhardt showed us, the future is in user-generated and searched for content, freely available on the web. Open Education Resources are the now and the future, not these expensive digitized textbooks or photocopies of notes and worksheets. If schools are suckered in by the text-book publishers instead of trying to effect *real* transformation of learning by shifting the focus away from prescriptive texts and moving to a looser messier student-centred approach. Text books are a comfort blanket to an approach that can descend into little more than a teaching-by-numbers regime.

Kids today are ‘Screenagers’ and they are completely comfortable with web 3.0 - the creative web. Many of us are still coming to terms with web 2.0…the consumptive web. There is the real tension. They come into school and we expect them to ‘power down ’

We need to be spending education funding much more carefully. Resources should be concentrated on fast reliable Internet access and wifi. This gives every classroom a window to the world. The world is the new classroom, not the tablet, smartphone or other device or the content it contains, and if we don't help our kids to enter this world-wide learning space, we prevent them from not only consuming content, but creating and sharing their own. This is what the speakers in the middle slots failed to grasp and unfortunately, this failure hampers school leaders like Ansie who has made such an incredible leap of faith into the future with her technology provision programme. Using tablets just for purchased digitised content is just doing old things in new ways.

Surely the time has come for us to use technology to do new things.

African Education Week 2013

THOUGHTS ON AFRICAN EDUCATION WEEK DAY ONE- FIRST SESSION.

This was my first time at African Education Week. This conference is southern Africa's biggest annual education showcase, featuring keynote speakers, workshops, panel debates, and trade exhibitors.  I arrived in Johannesburg of an early morning flight from Cape Town, taking the brand new 'Gautrain' shuttle (built for the Football world cup in 2010) to the Sandton Convention Centre and making it just in time to hear the first speaker, Dr Mamphela Ramphele open the conference. 

Now, Dr Ramphele is a long time critic of the current ANC-led South African Government and she wasted no time setting about them. Her assertion that "textbooks are the money laundering tool for the politically connected- that's why schools don't have textbooks"  caused a ripple of applause around the conference hall.  As did her assertion that the Education portfolio in government always seems to be encumbered with the weakest of the political elite in Africa.

She then criticised the current state of South African Education, particularly it's lack of technology, poor standard of teaching and professional development, and reliance on printed textbooks, promising a whole raft of improvements in the manifesto of her political party, Agang, at the elections in 2014. You can read her speech here

 Dr Ramphele is a controversial figure in South African Politics and she certainly lived up to her reputation in her speech. I'd put in a note of caution to Dr Ramphele here- education is a big conversation. You can't just announce policy, you must first join the conversation.  Particularly with regard to testing and assessment. It's not enough just to talk in raw scores and the raising of so-called pass mark levels..

I have to admit the next speaker left me a bit cold. Businessman and 'motivator' Kelly Ritchie appeared to spend his twenty five minutes shouting and taking his clothes off, even managing to forget his mic clip in the process. I'm still not sure what his message to the conference was really all about. I think others around me shared that view, judging from their bemused expressions.

 Luckily, Louise Van Rhyn rescued the morning with a thoughtful presentation echoing her Cape Town TED talk earlier this year. The message of school improvement by the community and business is similar to the ABCD approach developed by Cormac Russell . I'm not sure I agree with her thoughts on the quality of educational leadership though...I believe there is tremendous capacity to lead in our education system with talented people keen to step up and realise their potential. I know from my own management experience in industry that the skills required to lead in business are not always the same as in education and style can definitely be very different. Whilst business leaders can bring much to the table, what is really needed in order for South African Education to better realise leadership potential is good quality targeted professional development in education leadership and management.

Gavin Keller was brilliant, for me, the star of the morning. A real example of South African Educational leadership talent in action. Inspiring and culturally relevant, he held the conference hall in the palm of his hand- one educator to a hall full of others. A great presentation on responsibility and leadership with a nod to neurobiology. Change is too slow because teachers don't feel 'worthy' . Confidence is a key factor in effective leadership. I agree. I'm pretty sure he's a fan of Andy Hargreaves too... The take home message for me is that we need to nurture the emotional capacity of our educators in schools if we want to encourage change and success.

Johannes Cronje spoke next about leading change in a digital age. In a fantastically engaging presentation with much of it off the cuff, he took the audience on a journey of how he's kept up with the changing digital landscape. Making the point that with SMS and WhatsApp, as well as twitter and Facebook, our students probably read more than they ever did before.  His talk covered some of his experiences with his own students and you can see his presentation here.

Interestingly, both Johannes and Gavin took pot- shots at the humble pencil. I'm not sure I agree with this, indeed I think the demise of the pencil has been greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase the famous quote. I do agree with the thrust of both these speakers and Dr Ramphele in reinforcing the tablet agenda. Anything which gets rid of the annual text-book beano has to be welcomed, however, I'd strike a note of caution here as the eBook publishing vultures hover poised to push their wares onto unsuspecting schools flush with their shiny new tablets. Think before you buy- the age of Open Education Resources is well and truly upon us, and materials for learning and teaching are available....for free. 

                                                 (The lights are on but there's nobody home )

A pretty good first session. Some interesting thoughts on leadership and school improvement, however, whilst Louise's project moves one school at a time onto the agenda as one way forward, as ever, the practical application of the words and presentations needs sound and thoughtful political leadership as well. It would have been good to hear from the Government  minister responsible for South African Education,  however, the lack of any representation from this quarter was particularly notable this morning.

One big gripe though...there was no free wifi available to delegates. Quite frankly, in this day and age for an international conference  not to have a free wifi facility is nothing short of appalling!. Perhaps there would have been higher level of outward engagement through social media if this had been the case, because out of over a hundred delegates in the hall, less than ten percent were using their own 3G for live tweeting. 

 If African Education Week wants to take it's place amongst the leading education conferences of the world, this glaring omission really must be rectified for next year's event.