Content Consumers to Knowledge Creators?

Educators and Students as Authors?

Probably, the biggest news and possibly the most controversial in educational technology circles  during the week of January 16, 2012 was the release by Apple of iBooks Author.

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No clarification forthcoming this term on the boundaries and responsibilities of the school with regard to online student behavior.

The term "Emerging Technologies" is not a concept that is easy to pin down and a technology can be fully formed in one area of society but remain emergent in another. This is especially the case when emerging technologies enter the schoolhouse door. In the case of Facebook, for example, it's difficult to use the term "Emerging" when the social media platform reaches more than 700 million users world wide. Once through that schoolhouse door though, social media can be thought of as barely emergent.

One of the difficulties inherent whenever a new technology comes through the schoolhouse door is the determination of the legal boundaries and the legal responsibilities of the school. Most importantly the landmark was established in the 1969 case of Tinker v. Des Moines. This case established the idea that the school must show that a particular student expression poses a substantial disruption to the orderly operation of the school before action may be taken by the school against the student. This particular case involved a boy wearing an armband to school protesting US involvement in the Vietnam War.  the nearly half-century since Tinker, rapidly evolving digital technologies have complicated the legal landscape when school officials tried to determine what is protected speech and what constitutes a disruption to the operation of the school.

It appears that school officials will have to wait a little longer before the Court attempts to provide some clarification of this extremely complex and confusing issue.

Supreme Court Rejects Student Social-Media Cases

• By David Kravets January 17, 2012

The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to clarify on what grounds public schools may punish students for their off-campus online speech.

The justices have not squarely addressed the student-speech issue as it applies to the digital world — one filled with online social-networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others. The issue before the justices tests whether public schools may discipline students who, while off campus, use social-networking sites to mock school officials.

The lower courts have been all over the map on the First Amendment issue because they maintain they have been saddled with a Vietnam War-era high court precedent that predates the internet.
In the leading case of the three petitions the justices declined to review Tuesday, the lower court opinionurged the Supreme Court to end the confusion of whether that older case does indeed still hold in the internet age. The National School Boards Association also urged the high court to review the issue.
The association and others told the justices that “The ubiquitous use of social networking and other forms of online communication has resulted in a stunning increase in harmful student expression that school administrators are forced to address with no clear guiding jurisprudence.”
The 1969 Supreme Court precedent holds that student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it would “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” In that landmark case, the Supreme Court said students had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands on campus to protest the Vietnam War.
But that precedent, which addressed on-campus speech, is often now being applied to students’ off-campus online speech four decades later — a conclusion that some lower courts have said is out of touch with today’s reality.
The leading case before the justices comes from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled last year that local Pennsylvania school district officials overreacted and breached the First Amendment rights (.pdf) of a junior high student who ridiculed her principal online, using a computer off-campus.
But in 2010, the same circuit court with a different set of judges approved of the 10-day suspension (.pdf) that the Blue Mountain School District handed the 14-year-old student, who mocked the principal with a fake MySpace profile. The 2007 profile insinuated the principal was a sex addict and pedophile.
In both rulings, the circuit based the decision on the 1969 Supreme Court precedent.
Five judges in the 2011 opinion wrote separately that the courts should abandon that precedent, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, because it does not pertain to online speech.

It's been nearly 15 months, has anything changed?

It's been nearly 15 months since the US Department of Education released the National Educational Technology Plan: Transforming American Education - Learning Powered by Technology. What has changed? What remains the same?

It comes as something of a surprise to me that since November, 2010 there has been very little written or said about this plan. In fact, I was somewhat shocked to learn that very few people in my University Department of educational technology have even heard of the national educational technology plan. At the school level, the release of this plan by the United States Department of Education seems to have made no difference in the way in which the Hawaii Department of Education goes about the business of educational technology.

This particular document is rather a departure from traditional technology plans. It speaks very little about devices and connections rather it addresses attitudes and beliefs of schools and school leaders as they face the task of educating children to be successful in the world in which they will live and work, the world of the 21st century.

National Edu­ca­tional Tech­nol­ogy Plan 2010

Pub­lished Online: Novem­ber 9, 2010Includes correction(s): Novem­ber 10, 2010

U.S. Releases National Ed-Tech Action Plan

By Ian Quillen

The U.S. Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion intends to pay for research to study online professional-collaboration com­mu­ni­ties for teach­ers and other edu­ca­tors, accord­ing to the action plan in the final ver­sion of the Obama administration’s National Edu­ca­tion Tech­nol­ogy Plan.

The final ver­sion of the plan, unveiled Tues­day by U.S. Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion Arne Dun­can, also pledges to finance devel­op­ment of open-source edu­ca­tional resources and launch an ini­tia­tive ded­i­cated to defin­ing and increas­ing edu­ca­tional pro­duc­tiv­ity. Mr. Dun­can spot­lighted the plan in a speech at a con­fer­ence of the State Edu­ca­tional Tech­nol­ogy Direc­tors Asso­ci­a­tion, held at the National Har­bor com­plex in Prince George’s County, Md., just out­side Washington.

via Edu­ca­tion Week: U.S. Releases National Ed-Tech Action Plan.

From the U.S. Dept. of Edu­ca­tion… read the Exec­u­tive Summary

The National Edu­ca­tion Tech­nol­ogy Plan, Trans­form­ing Amer­i­can Edu­ca­tion: Learn­ing Pow­ered by Tech­nol­ogy, calls for apply­ing the advanced tech­nolo­gies used in our daily per­sonal and pro­fes­sional lives to our entire edu­ca­tion sys­tem to improve stu­dent learn­ing, accel­er­ate and scale up the adop­tion of effec­tive prac­tices, and use data and infor­ma­tion for con­tin­u­ous improvement.

It presents five goals with rec­om­men­da­tions for states, dis­tricts, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, and other stake­hold­ers. Each goal addresses one of the five essen­tial com­po­nents of learn­ing pow­ered by tech­nol­ogy: Learn­ing, Assess­ment, Teach­ing, Infra­struc­ture, and Productivity.

11 Novem­ber — Some fur­ther thoughts on the subject:

“There can be infi­nite uses of the com­puter and of new age tech­nol­ogy, but if the teach­ers them­selves are not able to bring it into the class­room and make it work, then it fails.”

Nancy Kasse­baum, U.S. Senator

“Teach­ers need to inte­grate tech­nol­ogy seam­lessly into the cur­ricu­lum instead of view­ing it as an add-on, an after­thought, or an event.”

Heidi-Hayes Jacobs, Edu­ca­tional Con­sul­tant, Cur­ricu­lum Design­ers, Inc.

For many of today’s tech-savvy stu­dents, step­ping into a typ­i­cal school is like tak­ing a time machine back to the days of man­ual type­writ­ers and wall-mounted dial telephones.

Hard­man & Car­pen­ter “Breath­ing Fire into Web 2.0″ Lead­ing &Learn­ing with Tech­nol­ogy, 34 (5), 2007

Per­haps it’s not nice to com­pare but.…

You may read the HIDOE plan for dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy  in the Depart­ment here. Please note, it’s based on 2004 national direc­tions. (eight years in the 21^stcen­tury = about 50 20^th cen­tury years)

Plato, Web2, and the End of Critical Thinking

The Web will be the end of Crit­i­cal Thinking

It is fairly com­mon, par­tic­u­larly among infor­mal groups of edu­ca­tors, to hear some­one  exco­ri­ate the Web, Social Media, and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy in gen­eral. “Our kids don’t think any­more, they just click.” The argu­ment is that Social Media and text mes­sag­ing are erod­ing, if not destroy­ing, the abil­ity of young peo­ple to write coher­ent sen­tences. In “my day” if you wanted to learn some­thing, you had to pick up a book, roll up your sleeves, and con­cen­trate. Nowa­days, you just Google it or, if you go in for heavy intel­lec­tual lift­ing, you can take five min­utes and read about it in Wikipedia.

[When I started UC Berke­ley, an under­grad­u­ate had to have a ded­i­ca­tion and com­mit­ment to learn­ing. In order to access “infor­ma­tion,” it was nec­es­sary to enter the “tem­ple of knowl­edge” (the Library), go to the mas­sive ranks of card cat­a­logues, and start thumb­ing. When three likely sources were found, cards would be filled out and handed to the keeper of the books. Elves would scurry through the stacks retriev­ing the requested tomes. As it hap­pened, usu­ally only one of the three would be of any use and the process began again. –Today, I can find more infor­ma­tion in five min­utes than I could in a week in 1967.]

What does this all have to do with Plato? Two-and-a-half mil­len­nia ago, Plato also lived in a time of chang­ing tech­nolo­gies. Plato was lit­er­ate, just as most edu­ca­tors use email, Google, and to a cer­tain extent, social media. Like other edu­ca­tors, Plato was gen­er­ally con­ser­v­a­tive though, and skep­ti­cal of change. One of these changes was the rapid spread of writ­ten lan­guage. Plato felt that writ­ing would, in essence, destroy crit­i­cal think­ing by mak­ing people’s minds lazy. Why remem­ber when all you have to do is open a scroll?

Does any of this sound famil­iar? This is what Plato said about the loss of essen­tial skills result­ing from the adop­tion of new technologies:

“[Writ­ing] will intro­duce for­get­ful­ness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not prac­tice using their mem­ory because they will put their trust in writ­ing, which is exter­nal and depends on signs that belong to oth­ers, instead of try­ing to remem­ber from the inside, com­pletely on their own. You have not dis­cov­ered a potion for remem­ber­ing, but for remind­ing; you pro­vide your stu­dents with the appear­ance of wis­dom, not with its real­ity. Your inven­tion will enable them to hear many things with­out being prop­erly taught, and they will imag­ine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know noth­ing. And they will be dif­fi­cult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” (Phae­drus 275a-b)

Plato was also pre­scient about content-filtering. There are some things and ideas that should not be shared indiscriminately.

“You know, Phae­drus, writ­ing shares a strange fea­ture with paint­ing. The off­springs of paint­ing stand there as if they are alive, but if any­one asks them any­thing, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of writ­ten words. You’d think they were speak­ing as if they had some under­stand­ing, but if you ques­tion any­thing that has been said because you want to learn more, it con­tin­ues to sig­nify just that very same hing for­ever. When it has once been writ­ten down, every dis­course roams about every­where, reach­ing indis­crim­i­nately those with under­stand­ing no less than those who have no busi­ness with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s sup­port; alone, it can nei­ther defend itself nor come to its own sup­port.” (Phae­drus 275d-e)

There are some ideas that not just any­one should be able to access.

Change is dan­ger­ous. It threat­ens to sweep away things that we have always believed. It fright­ens us because we feel that we don’t under­stand it and can’t con­trol it. Funny thing is: it’s always hap­pened and we’ve always man­aged to use chang­ing ideas and chang­ing ways of doing things to our advantage.

You could go to the Library and see if they can find a copy or…

you can read the full text of Phae­drus here. You can even down­load an audio ver­sion for your iPod/iPhone/iPad.