Making Lemons into Lemonade

A couple weeks ago, I wrote in my blog about Wikipedia and Wikinomics. This topic is still one of fascination to me (no, I don’t have anything better to do!)

My husband and I are in the parenting stage we call “housefuls of teenagers”. In the 21st Century, high school students, much like college students, seem to form their own learning communities to study various subjects. I love it when they gather at our home because it gives me a chance to find out what’s happening. Recently a group visited our home and gathered around the computer in the game room. When I walked in, they had Wikipedia up on the screen. I casually asked what they were doing, and they said they were researching something. I noted that they were using Wikipedia and asked how their teachers felt about that. My query was answered with, “Mom! We’re just using it to get started!” Then they showed me that when you scroll down to the bottom of most articles, there is a list of resources from which the information was gleaned. This list was the basis of their research. No teacher had showed them this; some student just figured it out, showed someone else, and now they are all infected with the “Wikipedia-as-research” virus.

IMHO what these students need, and what is sorely missing from most school curricula, are media literacy and research skills—for the 21st Century. With the loss of licensed media specialists in most of our schools during the funding decline of the last two decades, and greater demands on standards and testing, media literacy is often left by the wayside. The advent of the Internet has made information more readily available than ever before in history—but misinformation is more readily available as well. Simply banning students from CITING Wikipedia obviously does not prevent them from USING it.

Perhaps a better strategy would be to meet this problem head-on: Teach students how to use Wikipedia appropriately, how to evaluate the information they find there, and--gasp!--maybe even contribute to the common base of knowledge found there. Omigosh, we have just touched on most of the recently-updated NETS standards for students (9-12):

1. Identify capabilities and limitations of contemporary and emerging technology resources and assess the potential of these systems and services to address personal, lifelong learning, and workplace needs.
   
2. Make informed choices among technology systems, resources, and services.
   
3. Analyze advantages and disadvantages of widespread use and reliance on technology in the workplace and in society as a whole.
   
4. Demonstrate and advocate for legal and ethical behaviors among peers, family, and community regarding the use of technology and information.
   
5. Use technology tools and resources for managing and communicating personal/professional information (e.g., finances, schedules, addresses, purchases, correspondence).
   
6. Evaluate technology-based options, including distance and distributed education, for lifelong learning.
   
7. Routinely and efficiently use online information resources to meet needs for collaboration, research, publications, communications, and productivity.
   
8. Select and apply technology tools for research, information analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making in content learning.
   
9. Investigate and apply expert systems, intelligent agents, and simulations in real-world situations.
   
10. Collaborate with peers, experts, and others to contribute to a content-related knowledge base by using technology to compile, synthesize, produce, and disseminate information, models, and other creative works.
    

As an educator, you might be wondering, “But how am I going to do this? I don’t know much about Wikipedia myself; how ever will I figure out how to teach students about it?”

As it happens, I came across an excellent article the other day by educational technologist Andy Carvin. Andy writes a blog called Learning.now that is connected to the PBS Teachers site, and has blogged about both Wikipedia and media literacy several times. The article I came across is not his most recent on this topic, but what I found helpful is that there are many suggestions within the article on how to use Wikipedia as a vehicle for teaching research and media literacy skills.

Every course that asks students to do any type of research needs to explicitly teach the skills that students need, and not expect, as educators sometimes do, that “their previous teacher should have taught them those skills.” Utilizing the strategies from the article covers a plethora of content standards as well as the NETS standards.

It is imperative that our youth learn to research appropriately, to think critically, to question validity, to evaluate accuracy, and to use responsibly. Using Wikipedia as a vehicle to teach these skills provides us with a free resource, as well as an opportunity to do what educators do best: Make lemons into lemonade.

GPS Training

Music: The times they are a changin'

Downloading illegal music is a huge issue in most families with teenagers. UK rock band Radiohead has a solution: Give the music away. They have circumvented normal conventions and made their most recent album, Rainbows, available for download on the Internet--and the consumer sets the price!

Check out their website at http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/ItsUptoYou.html

Technology writer Steven Levy discusses the potential future effects of this phenomenon in the October 29, 2007, issue of Newsweek.

The power of distance learning

Sometimes we get so caught up in the day-to-day tasks of our jobs that we forget the broader view. This week I have had the opportunity to step back and take a hard look at how distance learning affects students and schools. And the view is impressive!

As products of the factory model we call schools, many of us tend to take the school schedule for granted: start at 8, change classes every 50 minutes, eat lunch from 11:50 to 12:30, more classes, out at 3:30. Halls should be empty and quiet during classes, students work primarily independently and out of textbooks, are only allowed off campus during lunch, only fraternize with students from their own community, and tuck away their communication tools at the door. How does this type of schedule prepare our students for their future jobs, where they are likely to telecommute, work with people from many cultures across mostly transparent international boundaries, and use technology tools ubiquitously?

Part of the answer is distance learning. Distance learning provides opportunities for students to learn outside of the box. It transforms both time and place as well as world view. Teachers can be available during extended hours by email, phone, instant message, or chat. The teachers have lives that extend beyond the communities in which the student live, communities that for those in small, rural areas are in many ways extensions of the four walls of the school—the same people with the same opinions doing the same things.

I visited this week with students in Prospect, Oregon, a small former timber town of about 650. The entire school district has only 180 students. Their principal states that distance learning is vital to their school because it provides the students with opportunities that they otherwise would never have. In one room, two students were taking an accounting class via videoconference, while 5 additional students, working on computers along one wall, were quietly working on their online classes which ranged from Japanese to Algebra to American History.

Not only are these students learning the content for these courses, they are gaining valuable skills in the use of technology and communications that can not only expand their own world views, but help transform that of their community. These students, whose education would from outward appearances seem underprivileged by many standards, no longer assume that everything worth learning happens within the four walls of their school. Wherever these students go, they will be forever shaped by distance learning, where they are discovering that the scope of their experience is not limited by time or space. As future parents, teachers, community members, and citizens, they will never assume that all learning has to be from 8 to 3:30 inside of the four walls of a building. By working with these students, we are helping to shape the future of not only the lives of these students, but of education as a whole.

Thanks for all you do!

Mindstorms from E-learning Conference

Wikinomics

Usually in this space I rant about how we must change our teaching methods to fit the learning styles and habits of today’s students.

Instead, today’s blog is about how these same technologies affect the economy. This effect is called wikinomics. Wikinomics is a term used by authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams to describe how Web 2.0 technologies have transformed many aspects of 21st Century society. More than just a way to engage and motivate students, Web 2.0 has become a corporate strategy to facilitate collaboration not only among employees, but suppliers, customers, and perhaps even competitors as well.

In the first chapter (which you can download for free), the authors tell a story about a company who took a chance and used collaboration with their own competitors in a desperate attempt to stay afloat—and it worked. The company is described pre-collaboration as “desperately needing to inject the urgency of the market into the glacial processes of an old-economy industry.” (I can’t think of a better way to describe schools.)

Tapscott and Williams believe that businesses will have to “harness the new collaboration or perish,” and that individuals will be required to “embrace constant change and renewal in their careers.” But the good news, according to Tapscott and Williams, is that growth and innovation can be achieved by learning how to facilitate this engagement through co-creation activities such as wikis.

This concept has interesting parallels with Cable Green’s stance that learning can no longer be proprietary: witness MIT and Stanford’s posting of all their coursework online.

And these authors walk their talk. On their website, www.wikinomics.com, anyone who’s interested can collaboratively write and edit the last chapter of the book.

On second thought, this post IS about teaching, learning, and schools. I stand corrected.