21st Century Teaching "Grin of the Week"

My son sent this to me a while back:

This is from "Encyclopedia of Entertainment" on Facebook.  In light of my opinions about digital media in the classroom (see my article "Teaching like it's 1980" from back when this blog was called "Artdog Educator"), you can probably guess my reaction.  I hope you enjoyed it, too.

Image credit: See above.

Are We on Digital Overload? Can We Protect our Kids?

Many people today watch the expanding role of digital media in our everyday life with—let’s be honest—mostly feelings of fear and dread. They focus wistfully upon things that we are losing or moving away from, in the changing cultural climate: things they value, such as silence, long stretches of uninterrupted time, or the act of reading a physical, bound, made-of-paper book.

And they worry—a lot.

While he's clearly not a young student, this man is juggling many different kinds of inputs. Is he on "overload?" Are our kids?

They worry that our digital gadgets put us on “overload,” and that this goes double for students. They feel that these devices keep kids (and all of us) too over-stimulated, that they load too much of the wrong kind of artificial light into our eyes, and that they keep us too sedentary on our ever-expanding buttocks.

They also live in terror that through social media their children will become entrapped by sexual predators and identity thieves, that they will become addicted to pornography from exposure too young, or that they will become addicted to games.

They worry that in the name of “multi-tasking,” we are doing more and more things superficially, distractedly, and just plain badly.

Online predators are a genuine threat to young Internet users.

Unfortunately, all of these things can and do cause problems. People who have concerns about digital media and the “information” or “services” they can deliver have many very valid points. There are a vast array of downfalls, dangers, and unintended results associated with digital media. And all of those fears/worries go double for the people who run schools. In most parts of the world, educators are operating in loco parentis legally. All sorts of bad results could rain down upon them if they fail to keep the students entrusted to their care safe from such threats.

How do they attempt to protect kids? Usually they clamp down, restrict access, and seek to control as much as possible how and when students use the Internet. They install blocking software, patrol computer labs relentlessly, and the best practitioners also talk seriously and frankly with students about the dangers that can lurk “out there.”

This is perfectly in keeping with a custodial role. But we need to think carefully about what we restrict and how we restrict it—or we can end up impeding the very education we are attempting to enhance.

Take as an example the story told by Susan Einhorn about her daughter and some of her classmates. They were preparing for an exchange-student trip to France. They developed friendships with their French “opposite numbers” through Facebook . . . but they couldn’t communicate with each other via Facebook at school, because the site was blocked.

This single example is hardly definitive, and it in no way diminishes the genuine dangers touched upon here. But it represents a dissenting opinion. As this series continues, I’d like to explore some of the ways that the use of digital media has become controversial, and some of the new and imaginative ways in which it can be used to deepen learning and enhance thinking skills.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to the University of Phoenix for the "distracted man" illustration, which they ran with an essay about digital distractions. The "online predator" illustration appears to have originated in Latvia(?), but I was unable to track down the artist's name. I first located the (unattributed) image in a post about tips for parents on the "Tech Welkin" blog. 

Pushback from the Education-Industrial Compex

Textbook publishers resist the digital trend.

"Bye-Bye"? Maybe not yet.

Apparently, some industries insist on replaying their own version of the 1990s music industry's resistance to digital music--and the major publishers of textbooks are totally there.

In my last update I talked about the potential of e-textbooks as opposed to traditional, printed and bound "dead trees" textbooks. My post focused on the versatility and vastly-expanded possibilities e-textbooks could offer.

Unfortunately, that kind of versatility and useability do not describe the way things are right now.

Just like the old record companies, textbook companies are doing their best to resist the new realities of the digital landscape. Some of their techniques make digital textbooks a very bad "deal" for students.

They persist in charging high prices, yet often make their books "expire" after 6 months--making them more of an overpriced rental than a purchase. Sometimes they embed copyright enforcement measures that make digital textbooks impossible to sell, and they place stiff restrictions on sharing, as well.

All of these measures hinder accessibility, jack up expenses, and hinder the use of the book. (And in spite of all this, textbooks still get pirated anyway.)

Add to these problems the unpredictability of platform options, and you begin to understand why such an apparent "no-brainer" hasn't really taken off yet.

Reading textbooks on laptops, with their backlit screens, is hard on the eyes. But other options are unpredictable.

Cautious districts are sticking with paper versions for now.

Will the Kindle fizzle out or take off, as a textbook platform? Will more people adopt the Nook, the iPad, or some other platform for textbooks? Will the book for any given course be available in the right format? Will any of these suffer the same fate as the HP Tablet?

To continue with the music industry comparisons, no school in this age of shrinking budgets wants to be caught with a storage closet full of expensive "8-tracks" in a world that has settled on something different.

 In spite of all this, I think grassroots demand is likely to turn the tide eventually. Especially on the college level, we're beginning to see it rather strongly. Some colleges are pushing for all e-text adoption, or e-textbook rental. I know of more and more professors who are beginning to eschew single, or even multiple "dead-trees" textbooks in favor of online resources. Most scholarly journals are available online, and have been for some time.

The world as a whole is going digital. How long can the textbook companies resist?

PHOTO CREDITS: 
The "Bye-Bye Textbooks" graphic is from the Schools.com website. 
Many thanks to The Beaumont Enterprise newspaper for the image of piled-up "dead trees" books.

Slight Delay in the "Digital Natives" Series

Next time I'll consider digital-vs.-dead trees

I apologize for another slight delay in this series. I am running another art show, and it's pulling me away from this effort a bit more than anticipated (stuff always takes longer than you think it will!).

I hope to have the next installment of this series posted during the upcoming week!

My topic will be the relative merits of digital textbooks vs. the dead-trees version!

IMAGE CREDIT:
This image is from the interesting blog of Dr. Patricia Fioriello, on K-12 Education Practices and Issues. the particular post from which the image came is "Digital Textbooks Online."

Teaching Like It's 1980

Rethinking the way Schools (dis)Respect Digital Natives

Most classrooms still look like this
2010 photo of a 4th-grade room.

Most of today's educators were born too soon. We are not digital natives. Moreover, developments that you might call "market forces" in the last several decades actually have held most teachers back from fully participating in the digital revolution.

As a result, we really don't "get it."

All too many of us are still teaching as if it's 1980 . . . except with a computer cart in the corner, to use sometimes.  Oh, sure, some of us have "smart boards" where our blackboards used to be, and some of us are required to keep in touch with parents via email.

But most educators just fundamentally see digital media (by which they mean "computers") as a sort of add-on.

• We still think of textbooks as physical, printed-and-bound objects.
• We make our students turn off or put away their cell phones when they come to class.
• We restrict access to the Internet, except for narrowly-defined assignment objectives.
• We often absolutely ban Facebook, Twitter, and other social media from our classrooms.
• We demand undivided attention when we are speaking to the class.
• We believe that, to be readily available, facts must be memorized.
• We call it "cheating" when our students look up answers.
• When we make websites, they are almost invariably really lame.

I am pretty sure we have managed to get all of these things (and more) exactly backwards.

That's because it isn't 1980 anymore.  I actually remember teaching in 1980, and a whole lot of my colleagues do, too. For us and for our students, that is unfortunately a problem. Today's students have grown up using technology that never even existed when we were growing up. This has changed the way they see and interact with the world. It also has fundamentally altered the kind of world their future holds. A "1980" education is simply not going to cut it, for these kids, even if we do pull out the computer cart from time to time.

In upcoming posts, I intend to explore each of the points I've listed above, and look at the reasons why we should revise our practices regarding every single one.

IMAGE CREDITS: 

Many thanks to "Gourmet Spud" for the fourth-grade classroom photo from the "Parent-Teacher Night" post on the Food Court Lunch blog. 

Enthusiastic appreciation also is due to the Tulsa Public Schools Department of Instructional Technology for the Pirillo & Fitz cartoon.

Gone Again!

I may get to see this scene in person, this week!

 

By the time this is posted, I plan to be in San Francisco. Yes, I know I just started posting entries again.  Those reasons were highly stressful.  This reason is not.

The vacation was an unexpected opportunity, not to be missed! Passionate as I am about education reform, meeting deadlines and doing my work as usual is not a helpful way to enjoy a vacation.

So I hope you'll enjoy this prize-winning view of the City by the Bay, until I return in a couple of weeks. While you're at it, you might enjoy other views of US historic landmarks that won the 2005 contest, "Imaging Our National Heritage." This view of the hillside, bay, cable cars and Alcatraz was photographed by Thomas Fake, and won first prize in the competition, which was sponsored by the National Historic Landmarks program of the National Park Service.

By the time I return, I hope to have been in fruitful contact with all of my digital-native respondents, and have one or more posts to offer, about ways that schools can respect the needs and perspectives of the current "digital" generation.