"Footprints in the Digital Age" by Will Richardson
"Footprints in the Digital Age" by Will Richardson in Educational Leadership
Will Richardson makes many good points in the article. The most profound, perhaps, is this:
"This may be the first large technological shift in history that's being driven by children. Picture a bus. Your students are standing in the front; most teachers (maybe even you) are in the back, hanging on to the seat straps as the bus careens down the road under the guidance of kids who have never been taught to steer and who are figuring it out as they go."
However, I have to say that Richardson stops just short of the mark. Even though he's talking about "networking, the new literacy," he doesn't mention nings. What's up with that?
Anyhow, what's your reaction to the article?
Connie
http://firesidelearning.ning.com
Will Richardson makes many good points in the article. The most profound, perhaps, is this:
"This may be the first large technological shift in history that's being driven by children. Picture a bus. Your students are standing in the front; most teachers (maybe even you) are in the back, hanging on to the seat straps as the bus careens down the road under the guidance of kids who have never been taught to steer and who are figuring it out as they go."
However, I have to say that Richardson stops just short of the mark. Even though he's talking about "networking, the new literacy," he doesn't mention nings. What's up with that?
Anyhow, what's your reaction to the article?
Connie
http://firesidelearning.ning.com
Tags: 21st+century+learning, digital+learning, educational+leadership, richardson
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Catherine Laguna on
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While I thinks the social networking technology is great and has promise for use in schools, I'm concerned that the students are losing their ability to think and write about topics in any kind of depth. My students may be writing on their My Space pages but they seem to have a lot of trouble writing a paragraph about an activity they did in class. They struggle when I challenge them to take part in a converstation with me in an intellectually engaged way. Will writes, "In short, for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely." I would like to see teachers using nings, wikis, and blogs but holding the students to higher standards. We should be encouraging them to have more sustained, informed, and meaningful conversations and help them develop skills as critical and creative thinkers in the process.
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Permalink Reply by Stephen Ransom on
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Catherine, I would agree with you regarding higher standards. Somehow, new technologies have always had this way of distracting us from high quality content as we are star-struck with the new tools. PowerPoint is the perfect example! Why have so many teachers settled for junk in the name of "innovation"? This reminds me of Todd Oppenheimer's piece, The Computer Delusion. Just today I tweeted my sentiments regarding my graduate students' abilities to write well, wondering what has happened and why they struggle so with writing standard research papers. I think it is more critical than ever with so many new tools, new distractions, and new potential that we hold students to even higher standards. No generation before has had so much information and data tools at their disposal. In our using them (and we should), we need to require even more, not less. The need for truly great teachers in creases in a digital age, I think.
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In the part of the Oppenheimer article called "Artificial Experience" he writes, "Ortiz believes that the computer-lab time, brief as it is, dilutes her students' attention to language. "These kids are all language-delayed," she said. I think that is what I'm seeing. The students aren't having enough "real" experiences and no one is making them talk about their experiences. Students need to be engaged in more one on one conversations with adults and be pressed to really use language to communicate. Without language skills they are left with very few original ideas and little ability to reason.
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Great connection with that quotation, Catherine. No doubt, students must be expected and required to reason well and deeply, both with and without new social tools and other digital tools. Being engaged in conversation is largely what Web2.0 is all about. However, if we don't preserve (model, teach, discuss, facilitate, assess) intellectually rigorous conversations, then we are doing the students a big disservice.
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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on
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Catherine and Stephen,
You bring up many important points. One of the themes seems to be students who haven't developed the writing capacity that you'd expect. That echoes what others are talking about, particularly college instructors. I've heard it enough so that I'm believing it...
I wonder at the reasons for students not expressing themselves well in writing, if indeed it's a trend, which it appears to be.
Could it be use of technology?
Could it be a new kind of attention span?
Could it be the over-focusing on test prep without enough deep engagement in writing?
Could it be too much focus on low-level thinking in classes?
I agree with you about the importance of holding high standards for work--and ideally, they should come from within the student. It takes of lot of ownership and personal investment on the part of the student to get there.
For teachers, finding ways to cultivate, support, and unleash that motivation seems to be the key.
Stephen, you are definitely right that the need for good teachers actually has increased now. How do we discover how best to develop, guide, and focus students' abilities to think well, to write well, to learn in great depth?
Maybe you've seen the great discussion at the Britannica Blog ("Brave New Classroom 2.0"). One of the topics is whether and how college students use computers during class. Some professors have found that having computers on leads to constant distraction and "being less present," which makes class discussion tough. Some have figured out with their students that there are ways computers can be used that intensify and accelerate learning--and both synchronous and asynchronous group processes. It's fascinating to read the viewpoints.
Regardless of the debate about whether computers should be on in class all the time, I agree with Will Richardson and Steve Hargadon about the essential importance of teachers getting in there to be guides and mentors for young people.
Here's Steve, in the Brave New Classroom 2.0 Blog ("Moving Toward Web 2.0 in K12 Education"):
"What is abundantly clear is that no matter what our schools are currently doing, most of our students are already actively involved in this content creation and conversation outside of school. In a series of reports recently released by BECTA (the government agency leading the UK drive to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning) on Web 2.0 technologies for learning, students ages 11 - 16 were surveyed. 74% reported that they had at least one social networking site account and 78% reported having uploaded pictures, video, or music to the web–with 50% having done so in the previous week of being asked. If we make the somewhat logical assumption that most parents are still living in a Web 1.0 world (largely passive consumers of content created by others) , then whether we see the Web as a dangerous collection of minefields or as an unparalleled learning environment, most youth are participating on the Web without the benefit of much guidance or mentoring from the adults who are most interested in their progress and well-being.
So, if for no other reasons than we might muster to justify driver’s education in schools (learning to do something very important that carries some inherent and significant personal and social dangers), we can argue for the need to be teaching Web 2.0 as a part of K-12 education. But I believe there are more positive, less alarmist, reasons. In fact, I think the inherent characteristics of Web 2.0 are so aligned with significant educational pedagogies that we are going to have to dramatically rethink our educational institutions and expectations because of them. Even though the benefits of Web 2.0, like those of a liberal-arts education, resist easy assessment methods and therefore present a challenge to how we measure educational success, I’m optimistic that they will ultimately prove so valuable as to require that we rethink teaching and learning."
If we take off from there--where Steve left us in that comment--it looks like the most important thing we need to figure out is how... how.... how... we help create critical, reflective, engaged, dedicated learners, using the new learning-scapes, using the learning habitats that are afforded to us through the technologies.
While also teaching offline skills and capacities. (Can online and offline skills inform and affirm each other?) So much to find out.
Thank you for your comments.
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Connie,
Sometimes I think we make all this a little too complicated. Good teaching is usually good teaching, regardless of the medium. I think the larger problem is that of poor teaching. This is not a new problem at all, though. And, it is much easier to learn cool new tools than it is to change one's pedagogy and hone one's teaching/learning skills. What I like about new tools and digital opportunity is that often it sheds new light on the need to change and hone one's teaching craft. The danger is in professional development opportunities that are typically divorced from this idea and are merely technical. Teachers [generalization here] need more pedagogical support than they need technical, I think (not that technical support isn't important).
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Hi Stephen,
Yes, agreed... Well-stated.
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Permalink Reply by Will Richardson on
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Hi Catherine,
Just curious, to what standards do you think you are being held here in terms of thinking and writing in depth? And if the answer is what I think it is, why can't we hold those higher standards in our classrooms when students are reading and writing about the things they care about?
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Well that's my real dilemma, how do I take students to a level where they see that conversation and sharing ideas is stimulating and interesting enough to put up with the writing part! I talk a lot in class about things I'm learning through my professional development, read in science magazines, saw on the news...to try to model sharing ideas. I'm beginning to think that speaking has to come before writing. If I can get them talking then I think it will be much easier for them to write.
To answer your question I can list the things I am currently trying in my classroom. We use a class wiki with student pages and class notes pages to share our learning with our friends and families. Students write about their lab experiments and respond to discussion questions then share with the other students and classes by reading each other's work on the wiki. We are using Voice Thread to document our lab activities and now collaborate with a class in Australia who comment on our voice threads and we comment on theirs. And today we embarked on a new project with our Australian friends, an online science fair where students will post their digital science fair projects later this month. It seems to be motivating the students but I still have to do a lot of coaxing to get students to form complete sentences when they write. When they leave comments on our blog I often sit down with them to edit their comment the next day, removing abbreviations, correcting spelling, and fixing up sentence fragments. I think eventually it will have an effect but it seems harder lately for my students to go from idea to sentence.
In the meantime, I love using these tools for my own learning and I'll keep searching for ways to get students thinking and communicating! Thanks for your comments. I enjoyed your article and also hearing you speak at the NJPLP in September!
Cathy
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Cathy,
You have a lot of lively things going on in class... it's so good to hear about the projects--the way you're networking outwards to students' friends and families, to classes other than your own, even one across the world.
Regarding your wish to have writing quality improve, have you ever had a group meeting in class while looking at "the whole" of your students' posted work? Do you have a smartboard or projector that will enable everyone to look at the same thing? How do you think your students would be about establishing a set of standards together?
I do that in class with 4th and 5th graders. We periodically look at our networks while we're all together F2F. We sit on a rug in front of the smartboard with the network up, then review what we expect of ourselves as a community. This establishes (or re-establishes) a basic consensus regarding how we want to reflect ourselves to each other and the broader communities of which we're a part. There's something about actually getting the writing up in front of us for group discussion that really hits home. I ask for volunteers who are willing to have their work reviewed by the group. Surprisingly, most are eager. (I'd think that some would be more shy about this.) Someone reads that person's recent posts out loud; we discuss the mechanics and (most importantly) the depth, clarity, and richness of thought. Students will often suggest "Add details!" "Tell us more!" or "Give examples." They'll request references and links, asking that those be attached to the response. I think this is good learning. Most importantly, it works in a way that's different from me imposing the standards top-down; I see pretty immediate upgrades in quality when the standards are emanating from the group itself.
Just a thought, something additional to try. I'd think this method would work well with a group that already has a strong sense of caring for each other, but it might work also to develop that care, that sense of doing a community thing.
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Fantastic idea! You see, I'm a science teacher not a language arts teacher so I don't think of these things! I'm going to try your method. I like the idea to "review what we expect of ourselves as a community." That is a really important goal for anyone using web 2.0 in their classrooms. Until a sense of community is established the students don't have the reason or motivation to contribute or invest in the group. Their standards for writing should develop as a result of directly experiencing the way good writing improves the community discussion. Thanks!
Do you have any ideas about language development leading to the acquisition of critical thinking skills? Their lack of creative thinking and reasoning in science class is what led me to question their language skills in the first place.
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Hi Catherine--
Let us know how the method works! Yes, establishing a sense of community seems paramount; that way people invest more of themselves in the work.
Here's a link to a thought-provoking forum that Marielle put up: "Teaching Writing with Web 2.0 Media." The responses are not specifically focused on your area, science, but do address the "thinking component" --and student engagement--pretty well.
Here's a link for Connecting With Nature, on Fireside Learning. Is that part of your curriculum? Here's a link to the great resource site Edutopia, the article: "Start with the Pyramid: Real-World Issues Motivate Students." That, and other examples of project-based learning on the site, might give you some good ideas.
I use Journey North regularly. "A Global Study of Wildlife Migration and Seasonal Change." Students participate by posting observational data and talking to scientists. The resources for thinking skills there are superb... Check out the teachers' resources, specifically "A Menu of Inquiry Strategies."
Hope some of those are useful! Keep up the good work--keep us posted!
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