June 25, 2009

It was a good day...

I finally nailed down my 1st scholarly project description. I'll be evaluating the potential educational value of social networking sites at the elementary school level by developing a rubric of educational elements based on a survey of applicable high-quality learning principals. Each site will be judged against that rubric in determining to what degree a site exhibits those principals or has those elements. I should then be able to not only rank the sites, but make suggestions for increasing the educational value of each.

I understand that general-use sites like Facebook would generally not be allowed in an elementary, if any, classroom. However, Facebook and other popular SNSs will be included with school-safe versions like eChalk and SayWire, in order to determine their theoretical value and consider the full-set of possible features of such sites.

The first step in this process is a brief survey of the literature on the general social and personal value of SNSs, a value which is broader than simply being "educational," hence the review of the Ellison article. This also makes it clear to me that I'm going to have to define "educational" fairly narrowly. If you have any suggestions, I'm more than open to them.

Cheers...

Social network sites and society: current trends and future possibilities

Annotation

Nicole B. Ellison (co-author of “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship”) along with Cliff Lampe and Charles Steinfield co-author this feature article from interactions on current trends and future possibilities of social networking sites.

By studying MSU Facebook users, this, generally very optimistic article lays out how SNSs support the management of numerous “weak ties,” which then facilitate the flow of “diverse perspectives and new information.” This flow reflects an increase in the social capital amongst the participants and is often initiated by the casual communication sparked through common affinities found on one anther’s profile page. These casual conversations can, and do, lead to more meaningful exchanges. These meaningful exchanges then can, and do, lead to larger social action so that not only do the participants benefit, but society does, as well.

This brief and well-written article is an excellent primer for getting one to think about the possible educational value in a large-scale SNS if one assumes that learners are pro-active information seekers. If SNS users communicate only with those whom they associate outside of the system, they are unlikely to acquire the diverse perspectives or new information that generally define learning.

By the article's logic, for one to say that SNSs are learning tools, one would have to confirm that users of those sites are cultivating “weak ties.”

boyd, D. M., & Nicole B. Ellison. (2008). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. Retrieved June 26, 2009, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html.

June 24, 2009

Position Statement on Education Technology Funding in Elementary Schools

I'm hoping that you will all take a look at this document and help me 'shore it up' before I present it next week. Thanks!

Position Statement on Educational Technology Funding in Elementary Schools

Josh Paluch

University of Florida

June 30, 2009

Take a moment and consider your own use of technology throughout this day, so far. Have you made a telephone call to ask a question of someone who wasn’t in your building at the time? Perhaps you didn’t need an immediate answer, but didn’t want to forget your question, so you sent an email instead? Did you send that email from the computer at your desk or were you on the run sending it from that very same cell phone that you earlier used to make a call. Have you needed to look up any information today? Did you use a book or a computer? What’s the weather going to be like tonight on the ride home? Should you bring an umbrella? I bet you didn’t use an almanac for that one. Where do you get your news? Do you get it from CNN on your television, CNN on your computer, from Twitter on your computer, or do you get it from watching CNN scroll the Twitter feed from their computer to your television? The ways we think about communication, collaboration, news, and even learning are undergoing dramatic changes and technology is making it possible. In fact, many of the uses of technology I just mentioned are examples of informal learning. Imagine the impact ubiquitous technology could have on formal learning!

The point is that Internet and communication technologies and their affordances in both efficiency and effectiveness have so woven themselves into the fabric of our everyday lives that they have become almost transparent to us. We often forget what life was like before these technologies were introduced.

I’m a public school teacher and until recently, it was impossible for me to forget technology progress because I had, effectively, none of these technologies in my classroom. Then in January of this year, our classroom, and my teaching, was transformed over a weekend. When we left on Friday, each classroom had a combination 27” TV/VCR, an overhead projector, and two outdated, barely functional, PCs running Windows ’98. When we arrived on Monday, through programs like eRate and EETT, the T.V. had been removed and replaced with a ceiling-mounted LCD projector capable of displaying a 60” image, which for a large classroom of 25+ students is, easily viewable from either my laptop or the brand-new student computer running Windows XP and capable of supporting any of the most modern software, including audio/video production tools. Additionally, our Media Center had been outfitted with numerous digital and document cameras, portable whiteboard tools, and two 16-computer laptop carts all available for checkout. Just to do my part, I purchased a relatively inexpensive hand-held digital video camera to compliment our technology upgrade.

I’ve always been a teacher who believes what both the research and my own intuition tells me, that students must be creating to be learning. Unfortunately, this style of teaching was not always as efficient as I believed it must be to be practical in my school’s situation. I’m a fourth grade teacher at an amazing, but low-income, Title1 school in Gwinnett County, Georgia. 75% of our students are eligible to receive free/reduced lunches, which means that a typical family of four earns less than $39,220 per year and only about 60% of those families have an Internet-connected computer at home. (Understandably, $39,000 doesn’t leave much for technology purchases.)

Imagine my students’ faces when they walked in on that Monday in January. Imagine what it would be like for you to be given the equivalent of access to an Internet-connected computer, a cell phone, and a digital camera all over one weekend? Would it change the way you work, live, and even learn?

We jumped in quickly and from early on I realized why students in this generation are referred to as “digital natives.” For many of them, it was as though our school and its teachers took on a new level of legitimacy and, correspondingly, they showed a new level of engagement. These technologies didn’t change the way I think about teaching and learning; they made it possible. The writing projects we’d always done for one another now had a potentially worldwide audience. The plays we had previously scripted and performed for other classes in our school, were now viewable by whomever we saw fit via our website. A PowerPoint presentation with a few pictures and perhaps some clipart audio and printed out for distribution was now an online digital movie with narration, background music, and the power to bring its audience to tears with its beauty and sincerity.

After this transformation, and while working diligently to make a tutorial video to teach other students how to use Windows Moviemaker, a project of his own choosing, Carlos said to me, “Mr. Paluch, this is pretty much what we used to do before the new computers, but it’s just more fun.” Engagement and connection to the learning process are conditions that lead to deeper and more meaningful learning.

Technology may become transparent, but it must never be forgotten that, properly integrated, it can be a transformational experience for both teacher and student.

Please continue to fund EETT, by far the most targeted program for educational technology at 2009 levels of $269 million.

The newest question...

In my last research question, I ran up against a roadblock of not having time to get IRB approval so I've redirected my thinking. My overall interest is still EdTech use in elementary public schools, but for now (ie, for the first scholarly activity), instead of focusing on safety factors of EdTech integration, I'm narrowing my interest to an examination of social networking sites' possible educational value. I'll be attempting to create a rubric outlining pedagogical elements necessary to learning and using that rubric to evaluate the extent to which current SNSs possess them.

I. Lit. Review of current work in the area

Terms: SNS "social networking" web2.0 facebook education "positive outcomes" "formal learning environment"

People:
Journals:


II. Lit. Review of factors of educational efficacy
- the ones that make sense for online tools, like these, and for elementary students (audience matters)


III. Develop rubric based on factors
- x-axis=tool; y-axis the degree to which or 1/0
- the structure of the rubric will emerge as I learn about the factors through reading. (or so I thought... ugh) They may come from what kids want/like, teachers, etc. I need to document where each factor came from.
- It will probably be under 10-12 of them both for practicality and completeness.
- Some will be binary, others will be scaled.

IV. Survey top 2 most popular SNSs from both "school safe" and "general use" categories according to Alexa
- be able to articulate why I chose the tools I chose (might be popularity, might be something else)

V. Report Findings

VI. Develop recommendations for future SNSs
Make sure to include conclusions for all potential audiences. Each will have a different perspective. Some will care about the method & the rubric and others will care about the outcome.
- for tools developers
- customers of these tools (school districts, ed leaders)
- EdTech researchers


* I'd like to thank Dr. Cathy Cavanaugh and Dr. Chris Sessums for contributing to these ideas.