Using Web2.0 applications in school

I am certain that the only reason I got onto the flight from Wellington to Auckland on Friday night was because of The Magnet'€™s propensity for misadventure. 

A fault in the original aircraft saw a delay in departure that allowed me to escape the consequences of arriving at the check in counter after the flight should have closed.   Mind you it was because of the Magnet'€™s propensity for misadventure that I was late arriving.  Getting lost in a Lower Hutt car park beside the Hutt River when I missed the turnoff to Melling Bridge and SH2 just has to be attributable to lack of clarity in magnetic directions given.  Another win win situation for the Magnet. 

My recklessly rushed departure meant that I travelled without my latest book and had to rely on the laminated safety instructions and Air NZ Inflight magazine for mind food during the flight.

The lack of engagement and authenticity in the safety information provided (ironical I know) allowed me the mindspace to think about the deceit in both engagement and authenticity in the context of Web2.0 and school.   

I sometimes think we get a little overexcited by notions of engagement and authenticity in school. 

For example, students may well be engaged, and the context may well be authentic BUT if nothing is remembered, has anything been learned?

A contemporary definition of "€œlearning"€ is a long term change in a person'€™s memory (thinking and behaviour).  So "€œI forgot to make a back up copy of my brain so everything I learned last term was lost"€ fails the criteria descriptors for a "€œlearning experience"€. 

I sometimes think we get a little overexcited by notions of Web2.0 in school.

We boldly claim that student learning will be enhanced if they are able to use various engaging and authentic  Web2.0 applications, and rail against the institutional blocking of access to social networking sites or YouTube,  but we seldom explain exactly how learning outcomes might be enhanced through the conditions Web2.0 applications offer the learner.

So the onflight question/s I was interested in exploring with respect to Web2.0 applications in school was

How can the use of Web2.0 applications enhance/ betray the conditions for student learning?

When I elaborated this I got

How can use of Web2.0 applications enhance the conditions for finding, organising, analysing, creating and sharing digital information?

To understand this question better I needed to unpack identifiable stages of "€œlearning outcomes"€, types of €"digital information"€œ and discriminating "€œcategories of Web2.0 applications".€

At this point, much like the use of a napkin to sketch thoughts in a cafe, the inflight sick bag offered a surface for recording the ideas I couldn'€™t hold in my head,

Digital information was easiest to unpack -“ I decided it should include language, symbols, text, movement, voice, and music.  And once Wii type game controller haptic devices become more commonly available in schools I will add in digital touch/ vibration/ motion information.

Check out the haptic cow "€œa virtual reality simulator developed to train veterinary students to palpate the bovine reproductive tract, to perform fertility examinations and to diagnose pregnancy"€.

In terms of learning outcomes, the framework of learning outcomes within "€œThe Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes"€ SOLO (Biggs and Collis)   is easily understood by both teachers and students.  The SOLO research suggests that students learn "€œquite diverse material in stages of ascending structural complexity that display a similar sequence across tasks"€.

I am still thinking about a meaningful  classification of Web2.0 applications“

All this inflight thinking and sickbag sketching meant that my question became

How can the use of Web2.0 applications enhance conditions for student learning outcomes, at unistructural, multistructural, relational and extended abstract levels (SOLO Taxonomy)?

When you try to include categories of Web2.0 applications and types of digital information in the question the options become so complex that it is best thought of as a multidimensional database rather than in linear text.

The sickbag surface was no longer big enough ...

The Web2.0 and Student Learning table (Full table web2.0 and Student Learning.pdf ) is my first attempt to understand the complexity of the question -€“ it makes a limited attempt to look at the types of digital information available, excludes the asynchronous/ synchronous dimension of the Web2.0 applications AND hasn't even begun to imagine a Web2.0 equivalent of the haptic cow BUT it is a start ....

Comments

[lucychili]

if we drop the web2 from that question and look at what our society is doing outside of school what society are we modelling and communicating in school and is it a good fit for what the world is and could be?

current and aspirational values around what our world needs?

current is easy/ier
aspirational is harder because aspirations are subjective or debatable.
being able to debate for your aspirations is what makes a voice in forwards possible. how does debate happen now
what governance and social systems will be accessible to these students
what ways can they influence their own future worlds
learning skills in negotiating outcomes rather than the more bianry approach which traditional politics has become seems to be where the heat and energy is in modern politics. at the least is is one avenue.

what kinds of participation enable people to learn about how the world ticks and how we each are able to participate. to be informed. to inform debate.

my aspirations are possibly not representative of other people's questions about how our nations tick but here are some as thought starters

how is the local ecology represented in our society? how does it speak in its own interests? what are the mix of voices around climate and biodiversity and genetic issues? what responsibilities do people wrangling genetic material have to the rest of the ecology and human community? how do people work with those issues?

what happens in an NZ ISO process?
what happens in the UN?
how do free trade agreements impact local law making?
what impact does this happen on local coherence of a nation?

what are the mix of voices around using restriction and copyright to manage information access and participation
do they fit with collaborative communities?

these are not school thoughts
these are not especially web2 thoughts

but being able to see the threads processes and patterns in our society
which are making decisions on our own behalf surely is something that
is a part of being ready for engaging with this world

what do you want them to be able to think about and to navigate when these students are leading and governing. what skills do they need in understanding the mix of processes and where their voices can be heard.
how do they find their own aspirations and mix them in to best effect?

this is what i think bloggers and people sharing online are learning themselves. how to navigate between what is and what is individually and collectively hoped for.

[Artichoke]

I love the way you challenge my essentially reductionist thinking on these issues Lucychili – just when I think I might be nudging up against the coastline of something meaningful wrt school you remind me of all the other planets.

If as you suggest we drop the web2 from that question and look at what our society is doing outside of school - what society are we modelling and communicating in school and is it a good fit for what the world is and could be?

Then I think we are beginning to get closer to that “powerful ideas” stuff that Bill Kerr, Alan Kay and others were talking about in the squeakland link you sent me earlier

• I asked alan kay some questions on the squeakland list and this has led to an enormous conversation around the topic of powerful ideas:

  * what are powerful ideas
  * why don't schools take up powerful ideas more?

  the thread is called 'the non universals'
  http://squeakland.org/pipermail/squeakland/2007-August/thread.html#3717

I reckon I could add to Bill’s query –why don’t educational bloggers (aka me) take up powerful ideas more in our posts?

In my case it would be because i don’t even see the powerful ideas until you suggest them.

I must, I must, I must get better at that “focal length stuff” that you incorporate so effortlessly in your thinking.
For example I read and re-read this insight

• “From a one size fits all perspective it is hard to be meaningful and directly supportive in a ple tailored responsive way.

  Broadcast thinking feels to me a bit like a 4 gen photocopy which has stepped back sufficiently far from the tangible to fit everything in and represent it in ways which serve no local purpose.

  I dont think that is an edu problem, I think it is probably a problem related to our capacity to negotiate complexity and subtlety and scale a broadcast model at the same time. ie Many global treaties and policies have been drafted at a level or from a perspective so far removed from the local context that they only serve as a means of abstraction for those trying to find meaning in patterns of local activity over a wide area or range of cultural experience.

  For those trying to speak local concerns back through the same system it filters out any meaningful dialogue or message, urgency or human factors so that governance is basically unhinged and can do either effective one off local projects or general one size standards activities.” Lucychili 30/4/2007

I am taking your “powerful ideas questions” on the road with me to see what sort of discussion they provoke with the people we meet on our travels in the next few months

1. Powerful Idea Question. How might we facilitate learning outcomes that enable students to “negotiate outcomes”? to be informed. to inform debate?
   
2. Powerful Idea Question. What kinds of participation enable people to learn about how the world ticks and how we each are able to participate?
   
3. Powerful Idea Question. How can we help students to see the threads processes and patterns in our society which are making decisions on our own behalf surely is something that is a part of being ready for engaging with this world –
   
4. Powerful Idea Question. What do you want students to be able to think about and to navigate when these students are leading and governing?

And I do hope you are right in identifying that “bloggers and people sharing online are learning themselves how to navigate between what is and what is individually and collectively hoped for.”

I hope I am learning to do this – but if I am - it is a slow and tortuous process

[lucychili]

Slow and inventive perhaps?
I felt tired last week. People were asking why I didn't take issue with something. And my response was that taking issue has a cost. Not following a known pattern has a cost. Call it friction or upstreamness or something. It certainly feels more like something enjoyable to do when there are other folks thinking about it too. I think its a pick your moment/s kind of thing.

For me this is the really exciting bit:

"I am taking “powerful ideas questions” on the road with me to see what sort of discussion they provoke with the people we meet on our travels in the next few months"

Will be wonderful to hear what people are excited by and interested in.
I am certainly learning a stack through these blog conversations.

[Bill Kerr]

hi arti,

thanks to lucychilli for passing on squeakland link and thanks to you for spreading it further

I'm tempted to try to individually link to some remarkably eloquent post on the 'non universals' thread by alan kay and also having another look at 'Mindstorms' who might have introduced the powerful ideas meme to education

link to whole thread , it's become rather large

I see a danger in making the list too long or too general, that may water things down again. Alan says his list is based on science, the outcome of anthropological research which gives us the universals. Then the non universals are those things that many cultures haven't grokked yet. ie. it's a scientific claim for what is important to modern civilisation, the first such scientific claim I have come across

Remember those past threads about "what is human?", "what is progress?"

[lucychili]

hi Bill

my questions were my 'what is human' and 'what is progress'.
each person will have their own 'what is human' 'what is progress'.
perhaps this is what youre saying.

i am trying to look for the processes which help us to find our own specific routes expressions explorations of those questions

we do need to understand our surrounding contexts in a specific and applied sense and to learn how our voice fits in and can impact.
voices fit in ways which we intend and want, which we dont intend but are happy about, which we do intend but are concerned about, which we dont intend and are concerned about.

trying to find the most personally useful and socially/systemically/ecologically useful routes for our own person/ethic ecology/use progress/enough is the kind of thing i mean when i am talking about the system/individual in ourselves.

once you have adapted to a system it is easier to be within that system
it is also in some ways easy to be a rebel or critic outside a system
(although swimming upstream is expensive) because you do not have to fix it because it is a systemic problem and we are only people.

there is more work involved in being free to be responsible for both the anomaly/freedom and system in ourselves. this is why people start with something close to them, that they can craft, that they have some kind of fingertip understanding about. wikipedia is something that participants know what the goal is. this makes it easier to formulate a system which works toward that goal. it needs to be npov. it needs to be cited. etc

campaigns wikia has struggled
the goal is more ambitious, or more diffuse.
it aims to represent political space and discourse.
so some people structured it for being able to negotiate issues
and some people used it to list candidates and campaigns.
because there were different ideas about what was needed it was difficult to negotiate for a good system because people were interested in diverse outcomes.
pov in itself is challenging.
i think this kind of project will be tried again.
or that this one will find ways to make a flow from discourse and debate through to political representation but at this point the wiki got bogged in the diffuse purpose.

for schools there will be systemic purposes and individual purposes
because the existing model is industrial the locus of control is in the system and the individual is tangential to the core purpose, or it seems a bit that way.

in a foss kind of situation people are participating by choice
this means they choose to interface with n systems and choose to debate specific points or to agree for common good on others.
where they differ they fork and aim to generate sfficient energy around their approach to make the fork viable. this takes more work and so
people try to resolve differences within the projects.

there is no insensitive system to kick against just peers and other volunteers. the collective momentum is valuable.
individuality is expressed and people choose their person and progress kinds of choices, but the control is more internal, and the system is
the child of the purpose.

because these things are challenging/work to do
and because we are more experienced at system/maverick stuff
i suggest try something small and close to you
where you/we can define the question so that it shapes the purpose and gives you/us criteria for working through and finding appropriate systems for the purpose.

not sure if this makes sense or if it is too far from the madding crowds to be applicable, but for me this is the shift i am seeing in my wider community. and skills like reciprocity and negotiation are likely to be
very valuable in these kinds of spaces.

j

[Luke]

what does all this mean for the classroom and the leadership team trying to grow and develop a richer understanding of powerful learning. At this point I'm putting this thread down to the "Tame Iti syndrome". Its radical thinking, discussion and action that drags the center to one side. I will just read absorb and be dragged to one side.

[Artichoke]

And by the third drink Luke.... we realise that the draft curriculum has been captured by cargo cult science

• In the South Seas there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he’s the controller- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the plane doesn’t land. Feynman cited in Rosenzweig The Halo Effect p16

I love the Tame Iti category - One approach we use is to start teachers talking about powerful ideas in schools is to help them tease out “powerful ideas” in the topics themes they want to teach before they plan learning experiences - We use an adapation of Harpaz and Lefstein’s fertile question pedagogical structure of knowledge template as a planning discussion starter.

The focus areas of the four quadrants prove valuable in getting teachers to come up with powerful insights as to why this topic is worth any time ... works better than the concept curriculum because it forces them to come up with the insight for themselves ...

For example

1. Insights
   [For example: Overarching understandings, deep understandings that help us make sense of our world.]
   
2. Controversies
   [For example: Disagreements, differences, disputes, divergence of opinion, questions ]
   
3. Concepts (A.O’s)
   [For example: Key ideas, processes that help build coherent understanding of the discipline, Achievement Objectives]
   Level __: Students can
   Level __: Students can
   
4. Skills (L.Is)
   [For example: Skills, strategies, practices that help build a coherent understanding of the discipline, Specific learning outcomes (students will be able to)/ Process LO’s/ Strand LO’s]
   Level __ – to be able to
   Level __ – to be able to

The powerful idea that comes out of all this talking is developed into a Fertile Question:A provocative and essential question that will be the focus of the inquiry or topic.
[A question that is Open>undermining>rich>charged>connected> practical]

I know that lack of deep understandings in disciplinary and other knowledge means that sometimes teachers just cannot get to the powerful ideas - and this is what I beleive came out of the Bill Kerr thread - but it is a practical way to start the conversations about what is powerful to learn at school without being dragged too far to one side.

Pedagogical Knowledge Framework, Harpaz, Y (2005). Teaching and learning in a community of thinking. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, Volume 20, Number 2. 136-157.

[lucychili]

social networking stats via chris sessums UK
http://eduspaces.net/csessums/weblog/190701.html

[lucychili]

Luke

If I am off topic I apologise. =)

Take it back to Bill's questions?
What are your aspirations as person?
What does progress look like for you?
What is your own centre? How do you negotiate for those things?
Same question for your students? and from the bigger scale it implies similar things for our schools and communities?
Negotiating win/win and reciprocity are skills and processes, and that we can only learn them in situations where someone has *not* already pegged out what is correct before we start?

[Mike Caulfield]

So I'm looking at this taxonomy, which as taxonomies go seems pretty decent (it's apparently more prevalent in UK, NZ, and AU?).

So is your point to define what proficiency means in the use of these tools?

E.g. for del.icio.us:

Prestructural: Student uses del.icio.us like Google. Executes sequential searches, retrieves docs, reads.

Uni- and Multi-strcutural: Student starts to navigate del.icio.us with intuitive sense that a) reputation matters, b) examining a person's terms helps one to refine, c) you want to alternate between seeing what a person points to, and what people point to an item, and d) you learn more from looking at the small number of people pointing to an esoteric item than you do from a large number of people pointing to popular item.

Relational: Basically the above, but understanding the fuller context: That we find people through common interest, then expand our range by looking at the other things these people like.

Extended abstract: student can articulate how such things have always been true in the physical world -- one is attracted to friends because of shared like of a musical artist, which leads to trying out other artists that person likes. Student can see how del.icio.us is similar to MySpace and Facebook, and how it is different. Student can identify potential pitfalls (group think? cultism?) of networked reference sites, and develop strategies that work across multiple domains.

Is that the sort of thing we're looking at?

I'm really interested in how you are going to fill in these boxes.

[lucychili]

http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm
the first post today feels like it is around this topic.

[Artichoke]

Thanks for the link Lucychili

I like Stephen’s argument here ...

“their first - and only - responsibility will be to look at what we have created, and to determine whether any of it is worth keeping”

it reminds me of some of the social engineering claims made about the introduction of our Key Competency thing in New Zealand –

I don't think the problem lies in identifying what is powerful to understand but rather in how this is communicated

Instead of asking what methods of instructional design and or environments are most effective in enhancing the understanding of the key competencies or citizenship or what it is to be human – we should be looking for counterexamples - Are there methods of instructional design and or environments that reinforce conformity, imprinting, uncritical acceptance, indoctrination, reinforce the antithesis of being a citizen/ being human etc? Which I think is what Stepehn identifies

• It's wrong to thing that we can create 'citizens' the way we create Buicks, it's wrong to suppose that people should be 'global citizens' rather than representative of their distinctive histories, homes and cultures, it's wrong to suppose we can instill some sense of responsibility on them without their advice and consent, and it's wrong to suppose that freedom is something that can be created or given to a population at all. Our children aren't little instruments designed to live our our ideals for us; we have to do that ourselves, and let our children define their own values in their own good time, and their first - and only - responsibility will be to look at what we have created, and to determine whether any of it is worth keeping. And when I look at the world we are giving them, I'm hesitant to be so proud. OL Daily Downes August 28, 2007

[Artichoke]

And Mike - thanks so much for this new thinking shared about SOLO and proficiencies -

I want to look at it in a">http://artichoke.typepad.com/artichoke/2007/08/dance-the-orang.html">a bigger space than a comment box allows ...