Education, Tech Integration, Star Trek and Goofy?

I believe that much of what we need to know about the universe can be found in old Star Trek episodes. My musings about successfully integrating technology into schools solidified this claim for me.

Short Version:

Successfully integrating technology leads to the technology almost becoming invisible as the users get to focus on what is most important (see video 1 below). Investing in users' confidence and capabilities can empower them to overcome any obstacles technology can throw their way (see the second video below). Technology integration is about investing in people first and foremost.









Longer Version:

Integrating any technology obviously involves planning. In their article "All Aboard!", David and Margaret Carpenter (2008) break down some key aspects to consider. They utilized the Honk Kong International School as their model for this article and here is some of what they found in regards to integrating technology into instructional practices:

• Empower teachers - Teachers at HKIS had intense workloads combined with high expectations. Allowing teachers to take the lead and collaborate with other stakeholders was very effective.



• Focus - HKIS didn't try to rewrite the manual on education; they took manageable chunks and constantly reviewed their progress.



• Collaborate - Very simple...a collaborative focus allowed integration to flow more smoothly horizontally and vertically across the curriculum.



• Define everyone as learner - "classroom teachers learned new technology and information literacy skills alongside their students." (p. 20)



• Include Curriculum - It needs to be mentioned that all of the above steps involved a concerted effort to involve curricular changes/implications to their integration efforts.

Take a look back at the above list and ask yourself "What was central to the integration plan...the technology? the users? the curriculum?"

TPACK is another model that looks at the integration of technology. Keep the above questions in mind as you look at the quote and the image from their website below.

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to capture some of the essential qualities of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. At the heart of the TPACK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: Content (CK), Pedagogy (PK), and Technology (TK)...True technology integration is understanding and negotiating the relationships between these three components of knowledge. A teacher capable of negotiating these relationships represents a form of expertise different from, and greater than, the knowledge of a disciplinary expert (say a mathematician or a historian), a technology expert (a computer scientist) and a pedagogical expert (an experienced educator.




Sorry for all the highlighting but the above information is crucial. The implications of the above videos and quotes on education in the 21st Century are huge. While some may be looking for specific tips, I am not at that point yet. I am still stuck at wrestling with the big picture and with all of the connections between this topic and countless others.

Implications

1. Investing in people is paramount! It has always amazed me how the characters in Star Trek just seemed to know how to fix, adapt, and utilize every piece of technology especially in the heat of battle. Sure, the technology was amazing but at some point in the past there must have been some amazing PD opportunities that solidified their skills. Imagine how different the episodes would have looked if Starfleet built starships but filled them with people who feared technology and had no clue how to use it?

2. Solely focusing on access is counterproductive! There is a huge concern about the digital divide in our nations and especially in our schools. The temptation to focus on access issues by purchasing computers is great but...what if these expensive hardware roll out plans are actually feeding the digital divide?

When new teachers enter the classroom, many are armed with a variety of
technological tools to enhance their curriculum, but too often,a digital divide
exists between teachers and students. Without reform and the empowerment of
teachers and students, schools will widen the digital divide and create an
unavoidable abyss. (Mullen & Wedwick, 2008, p.66)

This quote further supports the TPACK model above and its focus on the complex nature of technology and human knowledge. Mullen & Wedwick go on even further to bring up other topics such as 21st century skills and novel definitions of literacy. I have experienced the frustration of being thrown into a sea of new technologies without any clue about what to do with them. I remember feeling angry, stupid, anxious...but I never considered the broader ramifications. This limited definition of technology integration ("if we buy it they will integrate it") not only harmed me emotionally but actually may have widened the digital divide, undermined efforts to instill 21st century skills in my students, and greatly hampered the level of literacy in my school.

3. Evaluate who we are before we plan where we want to go! Every context, every individual is highly unique. This uniqueness has to fuel or temper your integration plans.

• Do we acknowledge/understand the uniqueness of the 21st century? (Ian Jukes, Wesly Fryer, Dawnelai , Jackie)



• Do we have standards and/or curricular mandates that guide/require technological integration? (ISTE, AASL, ShirJorg)



• Do we acknowledge/understand the uniqueness and the desires of our students...our peers? (Cynthia, Digital_Nation, Marc Prensky, Jane McGonigal,eSchool News)



• Do we embrace risk and freedom as things staff and students NEED to learn or do we shelter them at all costs? (Doug Johnson, YALSA, cippic, Nicholas Bramble, Cool Cat, unquiet librarian)



• Is professional development paramount to our success or do we tacitly believe professionals are MacGyvers who magically know all, see all, and can fix all? If we do see professionals as learners, what priority, effort, and resources have we put behind their learning? (Natasha, Ruth, me, ETPD, Konrad Glogowski)

Our efforts to integrate technology will be facilitated or impeded by our answers to these questions. For instance, if we don't even acknowledge the pervasiveness of technology and that society demands novel skills from effective citizens, then integration efforts may be weaker or nonexistent. If we acknowledge the importance of 21st century skills BUT our view of risk directs us to filter everything then our integration strategies will follow suit.

One final thought. Integrating technology is not new. I came across a video today of a fictitious teacher who in his eyes had probably successfully integrated technology into his classroom. Watch the video through the lens of the above questions and ask yourself "Would this teacher embrace change?", "Should this teacher embrace change?", and "Who is benefitting from his use of technology?"

Nonhyperlinked Resources:

Carpenter, D. & Carpenter, M. (2008) All aboard! Learning & Leading with Technology, December/January, 18-21.

Mullen, R. & Wedwick, L. (2008) Avoiding the digital abyss: Getting started int eh classroom with YouTube, digital stories, and blogs. The Clearing House, 82(2), 66-69.

Professional Development, Complexity, and Mutual Responsibility

This week's exploration of technology professional development was probably one of the most intensely reflective weeks I have experienced in a long time. 1000 words is insufficient to describe this reflective journey so....here we go.

Short Version:

Like snowflakes, every professional is highly unique and complex. In order for each professional to develop we need professional development opportunities that honor this uniqueness and complexity. Shifting topics in seminars does not actually produce diverse experiences. Responsibility for the effectiveness of professional development falls on the shoulders of the designers AND the participants.

Setting the Stage:

A) If the learning opportunity is passive, doesn't meet the needs of the learner, and the designer doesn't understand the participants then development is unlikely:

Click here for a humorous but poignant example.

B) Each individual has unique and specific needs, wants, histories, beliefs, experiences, working contexts, and perceptions that can make meeting their needs very demanding:



Judi Harris in her four part series "One Sized Doesn't Fit All: Customizing Educational Technology Professional Development" (2008) does an excellent job of exploring these complexities. Over this four part series she lists the following factors to consider in terms of technological professional development:

• learning needs/preferences


• personal/school/district goals. In Part 1 of her series she lists awareness, curriculum integration, shifts in instructional techniques, curricular/instructional reform, organizational change, and social change.


• technological adoption style. In Part 3 of her series she suggests four highly distinct groups: innovators, early adopters, late adopters, and laggards. Individuals from each group vary in their openness to utilitzing new technologies and their ability to navigate the bumps and bruises along the way to adopting these new technologies.


• curriculum content


• pedagogical slants


• and the list goes on

Kimberley Ketterer (2007) deepens adds to this discussion of complexity by exposing that different professionals prefer to learn in different ways.

• Coach - "They are willing to take risks at integrating technology into their curriculum as long as they have support and encouragement from a colleague tbey can trust" (p. 21)


• Nurture - "They need a nurturing teaching partner who is willing to help develop and model lessons. Someone to provide encouragement to move forward applauding small achievements while at the same time, continually building self-confidence." (p. 21)


• Nudge - "only attend tecbnology integration workshops when attendance is mandated. They need to be gently pushed, prodded, and cajoled into learning how to integrate technology." (p. 21)

Hopefully the above points will support my claim that polarizing teachers into two camps (new school and old school) is not accurate.

As professionals we spend countless hours on differentiated instructional techniques for our students...why don't we apply the same principles to ourselves?

Implications:

1) We need to redefine ourselves as learners above all else. If teachers, administrators, librarians, and educational tech. support staff did this then maybe we would afford ourselves the same level of expertise and attention we give our students

So much of professional development is throwing everyone in a room and having them learn the same stuff. Maybe there is some choice in the offerings, but by and large there is very little attempt at creating a customized professional development curriculum for teachers...Teachers are learners. If they’re not, they shouldn’t be teachers. In a world where we can engage in our passions through the affordances of connective technologies online, we need to be thinking about how to personalize the learning of the adults in the room as well as the kids. Will Richardson

2) Individualized development plans with a communal flavour is the recipe for success.

Technology-related professional development is undergoing a transformation. Previously, teachers were expected to become proficient with technology through a series of sessions and limited support resources (Plair,2008, p. 71)

According to Plair (2008) many plans lack the personal touch and the time investment needed to allow teachers to master the technology. Harris (2008) concurs:

"Research evidence indicates that 30 hours of focused professional development,
on average, is required to change teachers' professional practice...most
teachers probably have not had sufficient time or opportunity to engage in
the kinds of professional learning necessary to help them to use educational
technologies in new ways to assist their students'learning." (p. 18)

Personal learning networks may hold the key:

"A Personal Learning Network or PLN is a dedicated learning environment unique to each individual. What does that mean? It means that this is a place where people create their own environment which helps them to grow/learn. This can be done in many different ways through collaborating, blogging, social networking, etc. What makes PLN’s so great is that they are different for everybody but their goals are usually the same. That goal is to learn and share knowledge and to find a passion and follow it to the best of your ability." unquietlibrarian

In short, money and resources should be put behind teachers connecting with other professionals. These networks and communities mean more than sharing resources; they are mini research teams, instant "geek squad" tech support crews, midnight hour "Dr. Philish" emotional support teams, instantaneous/specific feedback syndicates and best of all...groups of professionals sharing real life examples of technological best practices. Thanks to web 2.0 tools there are countless ways to establish these networks with little or no expense. Cathy Nelson, David Kapuler provide some ideas on what these networks look like and how they can be set up.

3) Leaders are needed to make technology integration possible. Scott Macleod very bluntly asserts that "administrators are the only individuals with the ability to redesign school
organizations. They set the vision, control the budget, reassign personnel, empower others, alter school culture, establish priorities, facilitate buy-in, reallocate resources, and ensure organizational alignment." I agree with him that administrators are key as they can get creative to free teachers up to pursue professional networking opportunites and to play with technology. I would go one step further and say it is also the teachers' and librarians' responsibility to demand this type of leadership and creativity. If we don't demonstrate a desire for more effective professional development, if we don't persistently vocalize how present models hobble our effectiveness, and if we don't actively pursue technology integration ourselves then we are just as culpable for our inability to meet the needs of 21st century learners.

I am out of room for this week. Take a tour of my blog postings. I am the evidence for the power of sustained and focused professional development. Since September I have been part of a digital professional network and I can confidently say that I am a completely new teacher ready to tackle the 21st Century. Imagine the state of education if system wide professional development empowered every educator to make the same claim.

Nonhyperlinked resources (all of these are must reads):

Harris, J. (2008). One size doesn't fit all: Customizing educatonal technology professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, February, 18-23.

Harris, J. (2008). One size doesn't fit all: Customizing educatonal technology professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, March/April, 22-26.

Harris, J. (2008). One size doesn't fit all: Customizing educatonal technology professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, May, 22-25.

Harris, J. (2008). One size doesn't fit all: Customizing educatonal technology professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, June/July, 24-27

Ketterner, K. (2007). Coach, nurture, or nudge: How do you learn technology best? Learning and Leading with Technology, May, 21.

Plair, S. (2008). Revamping professional development for technology integration and fluency. The Clearing House, 82(2), 70-74.

Trust and Privacy in a Knowledge Based Economy

Setting the Stage

"The knowledge-based economy: Developed economies have traditionally relied on the production and sale of manufactured goods, like steel, cars and consumer goods. In the modern knowledge-based economy, it is the creation and management of technology and information that drives commerce and the creation of jobs." Canada’s Office of Consumer Affairs (OCA)


"There's an old saying. It's never the problem you see that gets you, it's the one you don't see. So it is with secondary uses of personal information. This hazard arises when information is collected for one legitimate and authorized purpose, and then later used for another, unauthorized or illegitimate purpose." Canada’s Office of Consumer Affairs (OCA)


"Privacy seems to come down to trust. Trust that the people in charge are considering my best interest." Dawnelai's Blog



Short Version
Living on the internet is like walking through a mall with a group of corporate execs and shady characters with notepads documenting everything you do. The business execs learn what they can so your next walk through their mall will be more fruitful for you and for them. Who knows what the shady characters are doing...they're shady. Thank heavens for the giant bouncer you are walking with (the government) as he/she is trying to make sure you and your info are okay.


Longer Version

Canada's Office of Consumer Affairs offers a lot of great information about how public our privacy actually is:
1) "When we make a phone call, use our bank machine, or make a purchase at the store, we leave an electronic record of our whereabouts and habits."
2) Modern technology allows all the digital pieces of our travels to be collected. This includes info from cell phones, faxes, answering machines, debit cards, credit cards, emails....the list goes on.
3) Almost anything I do online creates some sort of record on my computer and on my internet service provider's servers.
4) You can delete your trails on your computer but:

"every time you connect to the Internet, you create an electronic record -- a data shadow -- that shows every web site you have visited while on-line. This kind of shadow is temporarily recorded on your Internet service provider's (your "ISP's") computer. Whether it is deleted frequently, or kept permanently depends on your ISP. Now governments have asked service providers to keep that data, to help fight the war on crime and terrorism." (OCA)

5) Communicating online through emails can be risky. Your messages can be intercepted and even if you are at work your correspondence could be viewed by your employer. Encrypting your email is a good idea.
6) Data cookies may be advertised benign and nonspecific information but they do say something about you and they are used to influence your online experience. If someone gathered all these little pieces of info. they could get a fairly accurate picture of who you are.

Watch the following videos about cookies and privacy settings. They are informative. As you are watching, ask yourself whose interests are truly being served? Do I trust the information being offered from a corporate entity who exists to make money?





Now compare the above message to the message in the video below. Before you watch below...ask yourself "Are social networking tools designed for me to share or for others to learn about me?"



So What?

I really appreciated my colleague's posting on this issue entitled "Privacy…we just can’t hide.". Dawnelai directed me to a quote by Danah Boyd who is quickly becoming a digital mentor to me:

"People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just as much about privacy online as they do offline. But what privacy means may not be what you think.

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It's about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting." Danah Boyd

I believe educators have the moral and ethical responsibility to teach students the critical components of trust. In Danah and Dawnelai's writings they reference trust. In the above quote, trust was linked to understanding and interpretation. If schools are going to spend millions of dollars on technology and in training librarians and teachers how to appropriate the strengths of web 2.0 then we need to equally focus on staff and students being critical consumers. Everything we do online leaves a trail. We trust the government and our ISP's to guard that trail and to make sure we have some measure of control over what is done with our information. We trust our friends and the friends of our friends to honour us by following unwritten codes of social conduct when it comes to our information. We trust businesses to protect our information as we believe they want to keep us as repeat customers.
The key words for me in Danah's quote are "interpretation and context". Schools need to become institutions filled with people who are professionals at critically interpreting immediate and broader contexts. For instance, it is important that we teach staff and students that the information they place on a social networking site actually may become the property of that site. This may not be a big deal if all people involved in the immediate context understand the rules of the game.

But what happens when the broader context changes like we are experiencing now? In order to protect us from terrorism and intellectual piracy, governments and corporations are changing how privacy and control are interpreted/experienced.




"In accordance with our conceptualization of the privacy of the act of reading, libraries have traditionally treated the privacy of readers as sacred. Privacy is a central, core value of libraries. This is the reason for librarians’ anger over provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that can force libraries to reveal information about the reading habits of their patrons to the FBI and other government investigators."
http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=68

"In 2007, the Conservative government amended copyright legislation. Under the new rules, making illegal movie recordings became a criminal offence punishable by six months in jail and a $25,000 fine.

Brand is concerned the enforcement of those piracy laws could violate Canada's privacy laws, because in order to monitor illegal uploads and downloads online, authorities would have to monitor a person's entire internet connection, he claims.

"Any prohibition on downloading works — that has a huge impact on the sort of privacy side of things. In order to know that I'm not downloading any works illegally, you have to monitor my internet connection. That's not the kind of society that I want to live in," Brand said"

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2010/03/17/bc-copyright-movie-pirate-conviction.html

This week was an eye opener for me. I am still pumped about teaching in the 21st Century. I was just reminded in a new way that we can't play school or hide our heads in the sand. If we take either of those options, our students may continue to express their fundamental freedoms online with no true understanding of what that may mean in an imperfect world full of rules, interpretations, corporate interests, and political contexts that are constantly in flux.