Technology use in the classroom helps autistic children communicate

The Economic and Social Research Council report findings from Topcliffe Primary School in Birmingham. The project received a grant from the ESCRC and the EPSRC. The children are using a large multi-touch screen and explore the virtual environment, interacting with an agent called Andy. The staff were surprised at the level of social interaction.

Research shows that children with autism often find computers and technology safe, motivating and engaging, particularly in the areas of social interaction and communication. Autistic children often struggle to communicate and learn effectively, but it seems that this technology can tap into their motivation and enable them to communicate in a way in which teachers simply can’t get them to do in traditional classroom settings.

Echoes 2 project

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Visiolibriphobia: Fear of Facebook

Afshan Jafar on Inside Higher Ed reveals why he is currently not on Facebook and starts an interesting discussion. Whilst he sees many possibilities for extending professional networks he is concerned about some of the social connections and also the commodification of ourselves and our lives.

FB seems to have brought everyone together under the guise of one big happy “friendly” family: why would I want to shatter that illusion by not “friending” people? People who couldn’t have cared less about each other in high school and maybe even tormented each other, now devour every single update and picture posted by their “friends”: “Ate the best strawberries ever today!!!”, “Vacationing in Hawaii and Italy and Switzerland”, “Going into labor”, “Awesome party this weekend”, “Have a headache” (I wonder why?!) and so on. I have friends whose “friends” lists exceed 1,000 people! How many hours a day do they spend in front of this beast?

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5 steps to building social media presence from scratch

Lisa Nielsen shares her tried and trusted ideas for how educators can develop their presence using social media and networks, in a video interview. Her first tip:

Don’t be afraid of zero – We have to start somewhere and when it comes to social media, that means starting at zero. That’s okay. Take that first step and join the biggies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Start a blog and don’t worry about not having any followers. You’ll start at zero, but it won’t be long before your connections reach the double and triple digits.

The other tips

Using Social Media to Engage and Improve Learning in any Medical Conference.

Christian Assad mentions that traditional conferences are difficult to digest

It is like trying to give someone a boiled chicken thigh with no salt or spices. If you are vegetarian it would equal an uncooked piece of Tempeh.  They are both good for you but good luck swallowing more than 3 pieces

He reveals examples of presentation slides he created which have a twitter link from an idea by Timo Elliott

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Social Learning, Complexity and the Enterprise

by Harold Jarche, with  Creative Commons licence 3.0/by-nc

The social learning revolution has only just begun. Corporations that understand the value of knowledge sharing, teamwork, informal learning and joint problem solving are investing heavily in collaboration technology and are reaping the early rewards. ~ Jay Cross

Social learning

Note: This is a re-post and update of a previous article, originally published as a White Paper (PDF). This web page should enable easier linking.

Why is social learning important for today’s enterprise?

George Siemens, educational technologist and researcher at Athabasca University, has succinctly explained the importance of social learning in the context of today’s workplace:

There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

The Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate on a scale as large as the printing press or the advent of written language. Charles Jennings, of Duntroon Associates, explains why we need to move away from a focus on knowledge transfer and acquisition, an approach rooted in Plato’s academy:

We are moving to the world of the sons of Socrates, where dialogue and guidance are key competencies. It is a world where the capability to find information and turn it into knowledge at the point-of-need provides the key competitive advantage, where knowing the right people to ask the right questions of is more likely to lead to success than any amount of internally-held knowledge and skill.

Our relationship with knowledge is changing as our work becomes more intangible and complex. Notice how most value in today’s marketplace is intangible, with Google’s multi- billion dollar valuation an example of value in non-tangible processes that could be deflated with the development of a better search algorithm. Non-physical assets comprise about 80 percent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500 US companies in leading industries.

From replaceable human resources to dynamic social groups

The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.

However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.

A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it.

MIT’s Peter Senge has made some important clarifications on terms we often use in looking at work, job classifications and training to support them.

Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life.

Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results.

Learning may be an individual activity but if it remains within the individual it is of no value whatsoever to the organization. Acting on knowledge, as a practitioner (work performance) is all that matters. So why are organizations in the individual learning (training) business anyway? Individuals should be directing their own learning. Organizations should focus on results.

Individual learning in organizations is basically irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.

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Towards Peeragogy

At DML Central Howard Rheingold shares his experiences with students collaborating using a range of social software, how groups interacted with each other and how they build a community of co-learners.

It’s not exactly a matter of making my own role of teacher obsolete. If we do this right, I’ll learn more about facilitating others to self-organize learning.

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Social Media still confusing and scary

In this post, Joe Prasad refers to the results of various surveys which indicate social media usage but not much social e-commerce such as providing / sharing financial information on social media sites.

He also looks at usage of social media in the workplace and employer relationships

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Questions of creativity

David White reviews the Berkman Center ‘Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality’ report looking at interaction, information and context. He situates it within the Digital Visitors and Residents JISC project, noting that higher education should be analysing reports of engagement and learning behaviours amongst learners from schools and whether learning practices are changing as they enter university

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Social Networking In Schools: Educators Debate The Merits Of Technology In Classrooms

from The Huffington Post

Some critics are calling for social networking to be removed from classrooms because of privacy, bullying, harassment and inappropriate materials. The article looks at a variety of studies which are finding positive benefits in using social software making learning more relevant and connected. It looks at some initiatives which are trying to create safer environments and communities

The comments on the post feature different perspectives from students, teachers, IT / technologists working in education and others interested with some in favour of using social software, some looking at concerns relating to the issues above.

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A personal cyberinfrastructure

The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 44, no. 5 (September/October 2009): 58–59

Gardner Campbell

Gardner Campbell (Gardner_Campbell@Baylor.edu) is Director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning and an Associate Professor of Literature and Media at Baylor University.

Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page.

Cyberinfrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular project, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline.

— American Council of Learned Societies, Our Cultural Commonwealth, 2006

Sometimes progress is linear. Sometimes progress is exponential: according to the durable Moore’s Law, for example, computing power doubles about every two years. Sometimes, however, progress means looping back to earlier ideas whose vitality and importance were unrecognized or underexplored at the time, and bringing those ideas back into play in a new context. This is the type of progress needed in higher education today, as students, faculty, and staff inhabit and co-create their online lives.

The early days of the web in higher education involved workshops on basic HTML, presentations on course web pages, and seed money in the form of grants and equipment to help faculty, staff, and occasionally even students to generate and manage content in those strange “public.html” folders that suddenly appeared on newly connected desktops. These days were exciting, but they were also difficult. Only a few faculty had the curiosity or stamina to brave this new world. Staff time was largely occupied by keeping the system up and running. And few people understood how to bring students into this world, aside from assigning them e-mail addresses during orientation.

Then an answer seemed to appear: template-driven, plug-and-play, turnkey web applications that would empower all faculty, even the most mulish Luddites, to “put their courses online.” Staff could manage everything centrally, with great economies of scale and a lot more uptime. Students would have the convenience of one-stop, single-sign-on activities, from registering for classes to participating in online discussion to seeing grades mere seconds after they were posted. This answer seemed to be the way forward into a world of easy-to-use affordances that would empower faculty, staff, and students without their having to learn the dreaded alphabet soup of HTML, FTP, and CSS. As far as faculty were concerned, the only letters they needed to know were L-M-S. Best of all, faculty could bring students into these environments without fear that they would be embarrassed by their lack of skill or challenged by students’ unfamiliar innovations.

But that wasn’t progress. It was a mere “digital facelift” — Clay Shirky’s phrase for the strategies that newspapers pursued in the 1990s when they couldn’t “think the unthinkable” and see that their entire world was about to change.¹ Higher education, which should be in the business of thinking the unthinkable, stood in line and bought its own version of the digital facelift. At the turn of the century, higher education looked in the mirror and, seeing its portals, its easy-to-use LMSs, and its “digital campuses,” admired itself as sleek, youthful, attractive. But the mirror lied.

Then the web changed again: Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. The medium is the message. Higher education almost completely ignored Marshall McLuhan’s central insight: new modes of communication change what can be imagined and expressed. “Any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes. . . . The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”² Print is not advanced calligraphy. The web is not a more sophisticated telegraph. Yet higher education largely failed to empower the strong and effective imaginations that students need for creative citizenship in this new medium. The “progress” that higher education achieved with massive turnkey online systems, especially with the LMS, actually moved in the opposite direction. The “digital facelift” helped higher education deny both the needs and the opportunities emerging with this new medium.

So, how might colleges and universities shape curricula to support and inspire the imaginations that students need? Here’s one idea. Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers — not 1GB folders in the institution’s web space but honest-to-goodness virtualized web servers of the kind available for $7.99 a month from a variety of hosting services, with built-in affordances ranging from database maintenance to web analytics. As part of the first-year orientation, each student would pick a domain name. Over the course of the first year, in a set of lab seminars facilitated by instructional technologists, librarians, and faculty advisors from across the curriculum, students would build out their digital presences in an environment made of the medium of the web itself. They would experiment with server management tools via graphical user interfaces such as cPanel or other commodity equivalents. They would install scripts with one-click installers such as SimpleScripts. They would play with wikis and blogs; they would tinker and begin to assemble a platform to support their publishing, their archiving, their importing and exporting, their internal and external information connections. They would become, in myriad small but important ways, system administrators for their own digital lives.³ In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure, one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career — and beyond.

In building that personal cyberinfrastructure, students not only would acquire crucial technical skills for their digital lives but also would engage in work that provides richly teachable moments ranging from multimodal writing to information science, knowledge management, bibliographic instruction, and social networking. Fascinating and important innovations would emerge as students are able to shape their own cognition, learning, expression, and reflection in a digital age, in a digital medium. Students would frame, curate, share, and direct their own “engagement streams” throughout the learning environment.⁴ Like Doug Engelbart’s bootstrappers in the Augmentation Research Center, these students would study the design and function of their digital environments, share their findings, and develop the tools for even richer and more effective metacognition, all within a medium that provides the most flexible and extensible environment for creativity and expression that human beings have ever built.

Just as the real computing revolution didn’t happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won’t happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment. This vision goes beyond the “personal learning environment”⁵ in that it asks students to think about the web at the level of the server, with the tools and affordances that such an environment prompts and provides.

Pointing students to data buckets and conduits we’ve already made for them won’t do. Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances. For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged. Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity. To get there, students must be effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own digital lives.⁶ Students with this kind of digital fluency will be well-prepared for creative and responsible leadership in the post-Gutenberg age. Without such fluency, students cannot compete economically or intellectually, and the astonishing promise of the digital medium will never be fully realized.

To provide students the guidance they need to reach these goals, faculty and staff must be willing to lead by example — to demonstrate and discuss, as fellow learners, how they have created and connected their own personal cyberinfrastructures. Like the students, faculty and staff must awaken their own self-efficacy within the myriad creative possibilities that emerge from the new web. These personal cyberinfrastructures will be visible, fractal-like, in the institutional cyberinfrastructures, and the network effects that arise recursively within that relationship will allow new learning and new connections to emerge as a natural part of individual and collaborative efforts.

To build a cyberinfrastructure that scales without stiflling innovation, that is self-supporting without being isolated or fatally idiosyncratic, we must start with the individual learners. Those of us who work with students must guide them to build their own personal cyberinfrastructures, to embark on their own web odysseys. And yes, we must be ready to receive their guidance as well.

The author’s reading of “A Personal Cyberinfrastructure” is available as a podcast on his blog, Gardner Writes (http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1).

Notes

My heartfelt thanks go to the University of Mary Washington’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and its many friends for their help in dreaming, articulating, and sustaining these dreams.

1. Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” March 13, 2009, <http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/>.
2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 5th printing (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), pp. vi, 8.
3. Jim Groom has outlined several key parts of this vision: “A Domain of One’s Own,” bavatuesdays, November 29, 2008, <http://bavatuesdays.com/a-domain-of-ones-own/>.
4. W. Gardner Campbell and Robert F. German Jr., “The Map Is the Territory: Course ‘Engagement Streams’ as Catalysts for Deep Learning,” EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Annual Meeting, January 21, 2009, podcast at <http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=746>.
5. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), 7 Things You Should Know about Personal Learning Environments, May 12, 2009, <http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutPerso/171521>.
6. Recent research suggests that overly templated approaches to e-portfolios and other online learning environments may actually decrease integrative learning and metacognitive capacities. See Kathleen Blake Yancey, “Electronic Portfolios a Decade into the Twenty-first Century: What We Know, What We Need to Know,” Peer Review, vol. 11 no. 1 (Winter 2009), pp. 28-32