Edu Panel at the 140 Conference Los Angeles

Just got back from a quick trip to Hollywood, in the rain no less. We probably got a whole .00001 inch, which meant that traffic was at a standstill. We just aren’t used to it!

But I did make it on time for the 140 Conference LA (Exploring the State of Now) where I teamed up with some great educators to talk about the impact of Twitter and other Real Time Communication on K-12 education.

Aparna Vashisht (@parentella), CEO of Parentella, expertly organized and moderated the panel that included Lisa Dabbs (@teachingwthsoul), Tanya Roscorla (@reportertanya) and me (@smartinez).

Aparna posted a summary of the conversation on her blog 140 Conference Los Angeles 2010: Edu Panel | Parentella.

We didn’t have much time, but I think we all made good points about the opportunities and challenges of bringing this disruptive technology into the classroom.

If the video appears online, I’ll post it here. (But the live stream wasn’t working and there were a lot of very upset techies running around so I have some doubts!)

Sylvia

The feeling of twitter as a metaphor for education

Repost from July 2008. Still relevant today!

OK, my turn. Obsession over Twitter, a microblogging tool that’s a favorite of millions thousands hundreds of edu-tech-bloggers, is running rampant over at Will Richardson’s blog Weblogg-ed – What I Hate About Twitter.

Will is ambivalent about his own reaction to Twitter, and the 103 (and counting) comments range from agreeing, explaining, dismissing, and accepting various theories about what Twitter is and should be.

In my experience, Twitter is a nice place to hang out with people. Sort of like Second Life without bumping into things. A lot like a lunch room. Twitter is simple to use and gives you 140 characters to say something, anything. You see everything your “friends” say, and you can choose your friends based on any criteria you like. So loose groups of people tend to form who have similar interests.

On Twitter, the flow of tidbits is fast and completely random. Depending on when you show up, you hear about mundane details of people’s lives, work highlights, baseball color commentary, requests for help, and more than a few musings on educational technology. Not surprisingly, when you get a bunch of people who live, work and sometimes breathe education and technology, the conversation trends that way.

On Will’s blog, the conversation about Twitter is fascinating. People love Twitter, hate Twitter, can’t stand the cacophony, want it to be neater and more organized, accept Twitter for what it is, and much much more.

But my thoughts are going elsewhere today. I’m thinking about Twitter as a human laboratory — as a metaphor for learning. Twitter is what it is. How people react to it is a mirror of how they manage their own experience and their own needs.

Imagine if we let children manage their own learning like this?

How many kids get the chance to express their needs in their learning process. Clay Burrell says, “I tend to jump in, swim around like a fish in a wine barrel, then flop out to dry up for a few days or weeks. Then jump back in again. I love the playfulness, the sharing, the relationships.”

Is there every a time we let students “swim around” in learning and then have a chance to reflect, to think, to catch their mental breath?

Nate Stearns says, “Twitter doesn’t work for me, but I know that’s more about me than anything else. I like longer bits to digest” Do we ever give children this choice?

Jarred says, “I often feel a need to “keep up” with the high-frequency tweeters out there… How many students are paralyzed by the competitive nature of many classroom activities?

From Christian Long, “The more we seek to create Twitterquette, the more the organic joy of it all becomes watered down so that only a small group of like-minded souls are willing to hang out.” From kindergarten on, school becomes increasingly structured and less joyful. In the end, only certain kinds of students thrive in this environment. We label these like-minded souls “successful” and denigrate the wandering souls with punishment, ever-more boring and structured courses with even less chance to find what might spark a love of learning.

You could read every single comment and create parallels about how most school experiences are so different than what we expect for our own learning.

Hopefully, you’ve realized by this time that I’m NOT advocating Twitter for the classroom, or even Twitter as a necessary part of an educator’s professional development. Far from it. Nor am I advocating that learning should all be freeform and lacking a guiding hand.

Some students can take the always-on, highly organized and structured nature of the classroom – but many can’t. What can we learn from Twitter to allow a more natural, unstructured mix of learning and socializing that might actually feel soothing to some students?

The “feeling” of Twitter may actually be what many educators hope to encourage in an inquiry-driven, project-based classroom. The thrill of getting an unexpected answer to your exact question. The ability to choose when to jump in and when to hang back.The excitement of an intellectual gauntlet thrown down and picked up. Watching experts do battle and learning that there are words to express your own inner thoughts in a more intellectual, accomplished way. Watching people verbally implode and thinking, “I won’t do that!” Socializing in a group and celebrating the common goofy humanness of all different kinds of people.

Educators who create climates of possibility in a classroom sometimes make it look easy, but it’s far more tricky than it looks to guide groups of students in goal-oriented, academic tasks while still allowing them to drive their own learning. I talk to teachers all the time who have been tweaking project assignments for years, subtly changing minor details of timing, instruction, environment and tools to increase the level of student agency while also increasing the quality of student work. It’s difficult, painstaking, rewarding work.

What might Twitter teach us about creating these learning environments?

  • The rewards of serendipity
  • Making it simple to participate, contribute, or watch
  • The importance of socializing
  • Choice
  • Freeing up time constraints
  • Questioning whether imposed rules increase or limit participation

Your thoughts?

Sylvia

How I ended up in the New York Times

OK, right. (My kids always seem to start their crazy stories this way.)

The other day I was working and glanced at Twitter. I swear, just a little. I saw a tweet that said something like, “Do you play games on your iphone”. I answered the tweet and pretty soon an email showed up saying I had a message on Facebook. It’s from a New York Times reporter asking if would I mind answering a few questions about playing games on my iphone.

Seriously, the New York Times wants to talk to me.

The reporter calls me the next day and we talk for 20 minutes about games and if I was a gamer (no) and why I play games on the iphone now. Then she asks if would be OK if she sent a photographer over to take some photos of me playing games. I’m thinking, how crazy is this? (and what should I wear!) But sure, why not.

The next morning a freelance photographer calls. She’s in Pasadena, a good hour drive from where I am. But she shows up and spends another hour taking photos of me playing games. She especially likes one game, Jelly Car, because it’s simple and has large graphics that show up well on camera. I play a beginner level for 10 minutes, starting over and over again while holding it in different ways.

And yes, it comes out. And I’m quoted for one line, and of course she managed to work in my age. Was that necessary? But best of all, I don’t hate the photo!

nytimes1

Here’s the link to the article, Yet Another Vogue for iPhones (you’ll need to register (free) for the New York Times.) It’s about how casual game players are a new market for games. No, it’s not about ME, but hey, I got the big photo.

That’s what you get for answering a tweet in the middle of the day!

Sylvia

Tinkering with Twitter

By now you’ve probably heard of Twitter, the latest techno-craze taken up by those-in-the-know, celebrities, and well, me too. It’s so popular that the inevitable “it’s not so great” stories are now making their way into the news. According to this Harvard study (link from BBC news) Twitter hype punctured by study, “…most people only ever “tweet” once during their lifetime…”

“Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it,” said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School who carried out the work.

That quote alone got me thinking. Since when does everyone have to love the same thing instantly and do things in exactly the same way. Oh, right — school.

A couple of months ago I wrote two posts on the subject of tinkering that have probably gotten me the most (offline) comments of anything I’ve written. Technology Literacy and Sustained Tinkering Time and Tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a Digital Age.

Part of the magic of tinkering is that everyone does not do the same thing, that people can easily pick up tools and materials (digital or otherwise) and quickly do something that is personally engaging.

Hurray for Twitter for making it so easy to try out, so easy to decide if it’s right (or wrong) for you. Hurray for a world where you can twitter about lunch and twitter to save your country.

Are there parallels to learning?

In some ways, yes… especially for technology, making simple tools available means people (students and teachers) can try them out and find immediate uses. Or discard them quickly. They have a low barrier to entry. Twitter fits this bill nicely.

In some ways, no… education is about asking youth to find their passion and make meaning of the world, without making them hate it. Even if it takes effort to push them into it, even if it takes a caring, persistent adult to show a youth that that passion does indeed exist. Tools that offer a high ceiling, a potential to go further than you ever thought possible, to create, to creep into complexity, to explore a craft deeply, meet this need. That’s not Twitter, nor most of the Web 2.0 world.

Tools that offer both are indeed extremely rare and valuable.

Sylvia