Creative Commons license: retrieved from Flickr.com. Image by Christian Guthier.
Desire to Learn
I encountered social bookmarks about five years ago when I read about Delicious.com. I was intrigued by the idea of being able to mark a page or website and access it from anywhere. This was particularly important to me because I was constantly trying to remember sites I had bookmarked at home when I was at work or vice versa. I quickly set up an account and got started, but didn't use it nearly as frequently as I hoped. Technology was changing quickly and my flashdrive proved to be a useful way to save things I needed when shuttling between home and school. It certainly wasn't a "social" tool, as I was only using it for myself. I found myself rebuffed by my staff when offering to share or introduce them to this great tool. As a result, I didn't have a community that I could share with and I certainly didn't think anyone outside of my immediate school circle would want to visit the sites I was finding, because they were mostly related to the work of my colleagues or the work I was doing in the library or in the French as a Second Language class I taught.
Social bookmarking didn't really become useful to me until I took Joanne de Groot's Resources for Elementary and Secondary School Libraries course during the summer of 2010. As a class, we were sharing so many good sites and articles that social bookmarking became a truly useful process. It was interesting to see what people were reading beyond the class assignments and what sites were helping them in their professional work. Diigo was a required site for the course and I found it helpful, but not as familiar as Delicious. I followed Joanne's links, but didn't post any of my own. I loved that it could store images and notes, though. The potential for classroom use looked huge. Like all new things, it takes frequent practice to become familiar enough to enjoy a new tool. I think that Diigo could prove to be exceptionally useful for work in my school life, if not my personal life. One of the things that should be noted is that I don't tend to share things with friends because I don't have a large social circle. The work that I do as a community volunteer tends to be with older citizens who are not really involved with technology, so email is as complicated as I get with many people I socialize with. With my colleagues, this is beginning to change. I share much more than I used to, with both teacher librarians and with my school colleagues.
For this course, I've also picked up Evernote and have just started to explore the options available. I like that I can mark a whole page and have it show up when I'm in Evernote. However, I find many of the features similar to those in Zimbra (my district's web-based email and sharing tools program). In both of these programs, I can tag, share with colleagues and organize my notes and pages into shared notebooks. The bonus with Zimbra is that my email can be filed into "briefcases" which can be shared and I can then add notebooks and pages to the briefcases as well. I also like the fact that Zimbra has shared calendars which are linked to the email and briefcases, also. Evernote is useful, but not as useful for sharing as Zimbra can be. It may take more time to find the full benefits of Evernote for my teaching situation and perhaps it may not be as useful as other tools.
Passion for the New
As I searched for current information (blogs and articles) on social bookmarking tools, I was surprised that many of the articles and blog posts seemed to be older. Edubloggers have commented on Evernote recently, but not on other social bookmarking sites. Even a search through my school's database didn't find anything particularly useful beyond articles from 2006 that were specific to bookmarking sites. Perhaps these tools have become part of the larger collection of social tools used to organize and manage information, yet the function of folksonomies and taxonomies as demonstrated so wonderfully in the video "Information R/evolution," (as recommended by Berger and Trexler) is really the key to how these tools will be useful to students in the 21st Century. This is perhaps the hardest part for me to grasp, as sorting information into traditional categories is how my brain has worked for so long. I still default to keywords that make sense in a library setting when I am tagging. Students, on the other hand, could organize the information they find, in any number of ways that are personally useful, then share those tags with their friends and peers in ways that make sense to young adults. It makes the idea of the Dewey decimal system almost outdated. I am aware that some librarians are beginning to rethink the organization of shelves and this idea is intriguing. Does "The internet need a Dewey Decimal system?" or are we moving the other way? Are the Dewey's Days Numbered? Information organization is clearly something we need to help students with. Will Richardson comments, "Managing all of that information is wholly different from managing the information streams most of us grew up with in the paper world. ...How do we find the most current reliable information? In many cases, we get that information not by mining Google, but by mining our networks..." (Richardson, 2010.) To create excellent information miners, we need to ensure that they're comfortable working in the collaborative environments of social bookmarking sites! Now to make sure I can tag along with the best of them.
Creative Commons license. Retrieved from Flickr. Image by Luc Legay
Nearly five years ago, this November, our daughter had heart surgery. It was not surgery we had planned for. In many ways, it turned our world upside down. Because we were at Children's Hospital in Vancouver, we were four hours from home and suddenly needed to remain for a week or possibly longer. Our need to be able to communicate easily with family, friends and work was immense. We had access to the internet and a computer at the hospital for brief periods of time, and sent out regular email updates. At the time, we considered ourselves lucky that we had a way of keeping everyone up to speed on her condition, without having to start a phone tree. The cyber frontier has certainly changed in five short years. In many ways, it's turned the whole world upside down, but as the Youtube video you're about to see demonstrates, thanks to social networking, we've turned upside down with it.
Who are you and how do I know you?
When the buzz about Facebook hit critical mass in the media, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Facebook was easy to get started in. I created a profile, added a picture and started looking for people I knew. Initially, there weren't many people I knew who were my age, but within a year my entire family was involved, mostly to see pictures of the children and find out what was happening without spending half an hour on the phone. Within two years, I was linking to stories I found interesting to share with colleagues and friends, and I could see that using Facebook at school could be a great way to keep in touch with my students. However, before I "friended" any of my students, I started hearing warnings about the perils of having students as friends. I was pretty naive. I hadn't considered that I really didn't want to know about their drunken partying and the accompanying images. I did however, let students know that after they had graduated, I'd be happy to be friends on Facebook. I have found safe ways to increase my professional profile. I didn't really want to have two accounts (one personal and one professional, which my husband has done), but I've created a page for my school and work at trying to encouraging people to let me know about events so things can be posted, thereby increasing the school's visibility among students, international students who have returned to their home country and alumni. This type of outreach has also begun to have financial benefits, as a local group has begun fundraising for high school extra-curricular programs through the alumni for each school. I still find Facebook mostly a social thing and somewhat distracting. Like most people of my generation, I'm still most comfortable with the relative privacy and faster use of email. Facebook is just too darn slow to navigate through, sometimes, thanks to the distraction factor.
One of my greatest concerns about Facebook, is the nature of how teens use this (and other) social sites. It has only been a month and a half since a video of a gang-rape of a teenage girl at a rave was passed around to many students in B.C. thanks to Facebook. The subsequent discussions about the ethics of passing along this type of video and the indifference to the girl's plight has infuriated me and many other adults. "Kick a ginger" and other "hate" days created through Facebook continue to thrive in middle school culture. Social networks have taken bullying to a whole new level. Rather than ban social networks outright from schools, though, it makes a great deal of sense to be more involved. The less adults know about what is occuring, the greater the chance the bullying will continue. I dread the day when my son asks to start a Facebook account, but I know that by being his "friend," I'll be able to monitor what is happening.
Edmodo Perhaps the educational solution to Facebook is Edmodo. While the layout will look familiar to Facebook users, the private nature of the site might encourage a more thoughtful use of the site. I set up a group fairly quickly once I had logged in. I also liked that it posted my name as Mrs. McVittie, which is what students would expect to see. It requires a group to send invitations to, but I don't really have something like that at my fingertips, particularly a group that needs an assignment. I'll have to get a colleague to explore this more, but I found my husband's observations to be rather interesting. He looked at it and wondered why teachers would use this at the secondary level, when Facebook already exists. Students will still prefer Facebook and having looked at the tools linked to the site, they appear to be rather limited, so as a tool for educational purposes, it looks to be rather limited. He decided that there were better tools out there and dismissed it rather quickly. Knowing my colleagues, I suspect they would do the same, as they want to use tools that will connect students through the tools we already have at our fingertips. Why reinvent the wheel?
Micro-blogs: Twitter as Educational Tool
When I began my Twitter account, again based on the buzz that was happening in the media, I was excited, but quickly frustrated. I had lots of tweets streaming to me, but not lots of people that I knew. I found the lingo of the site amusing and selected tweet streams that were recommended. I rather hoped that the one or two celebrities that I chose would post something interesting that I wouldn't normally read on the front cover of a tabloid. I really wasn't interested in building up a vanity tally of people following me, nor did I want to follow lots of people in whom I had no interest. Because I had to click on links and rely on what I was being told, I found it a little frustrating. Because the people I was following were mostly marketers, I found the links a waste of my time. While it was interesting to hear how Twitter was being used politically by young adults (successfully or not), I didn't hear much about it at my school. When I asked my Web CT students whether they found Twitter useful, most didn't have an account and those that did never really used it. Facebook remained their preference.
Since the start of this course, however, Twitter has become much more useful. Because I am following ed tech micro-bloggers and people whose regular blogs I also follow, I am more interested in what they have to share and what they link to. I almost always find the comments and links interesting. I've also started to enjoy the use of hash-marks, but they can be a little depressing. I was trying to tweet while attending the BC Teacher Librarians Conference in Kelowna in October and no one else was sharing. I was suprised,and frankly disappointed to be the only person sharing the great bits of information from Dr. Jamie McKenzie. I know I'll keep using this and will probably increase my use of this tool, particularly after I get my new smartphone in a few weeks. Having the right tools to microblog really helps!
I can't see student use of Twitter increasing, unless an educator sets up a process similar to this course. Micro-blogging only becomes beneficial when you follow other bloggers and have links and comments on events that you think your followers would be interested in. In terms of developing a Personal Learning Network (PLN), this could become the fastest tool to work with, as long bandwidth issues don't get in the way. On the morning that Premier Gordon Campbell resigned, I could not get onto Twitter due to the number of users and tweets occuring simultaneously. For students who might be excited about a major event (Me 2 We comes to mind) lack of access would be enough to kill interest in the tool. I think it will be a while until my son uses this and even my nephews might not find this particularly useful as a social tool, because their social networks are built around their phones and Facebook.
My Space
Of the big social networks, the least I knew about was MySpace, so I decided to check it out. I was stunned at how much user account information was easily accessible through the "browse" tab. Even more disturbing (from my perimenopausal, mom p.o.v.) were the nicknames and blatantly sexual images that users were posting. It was easy to find people in my immediate area, but I noted that the majority of members were in their early 20's, somewhat counter-culture and more interested in meeting people as a dating service. The ads on the site clearly focused on this aspect of MySpace as well. As an educational too, my initial judgment was that it would not be appropriate for a secondary school, let alone an elementary. Yet, I noticed, the local university had a page. Perhaps this is simply a social site more appropriate for an over-19 crowd, whereas Facebook has positioned itself as all-age friendly, and "social media continues to be age-graded." (Boyd, 2009.) This won't be a tool I'll be using, nor would I want to encourage my nephews or son to use it. It reminds me a great deal of the Edmonton-based social network, Nexopia, which also focuses on a dating and self-promotion culture. Nexopia received a number of negative media stories, based on the number of young teens who were posting sexually explicit photos and information with little regard for privacy settings.
Ning
Of all the social networks I had hope for as an educational tool, Nings appeared to be most useful. The privacy features and ability to be exclusive to a specific group made it appealing to me as an educator who wants to avoid grief with administration and parents. I love the Nings I belong to, but I have them set up to send me digests. They are a huge source of personal professional learning. The features of a Ning are excellent. The professional learning and networking is simple to do, but few people I know locally are involved and many of the things I read in my blog roll are here as well. Unfortunately, it's too expensive to create and put into place in a way that would be most beneficial for the classroom setting. For this reason, I can't see Nings growing in the educational field.
Yes, it's blocked. (SNS and Value in Education)
Ultimately, I agree with Will Richardson and Danah Boyd. Teaching about social networks is essential, but using social networks in the school setting is probably counter-productive. Students are too easily distracted in our current educational setting to focus on the learning, in my observations over the last two years. Social tools, on the other hand, are incredibly useful, which is why I like our school Moodle so much. It allows staff and students to work on wikis, blogs, forums, shared video content and podcasts, all within a secure setting. It's free and Linux-based, so that makes it more attractive to the cash-strapped education sector. The only draw-backs are the quality of some of the tools. (PhotoShop is a much better photo editing tool than GIMP, for example.) Is it a social network? No. While it includes sixteen of the listed features in Berger and Trexler's comparative chart of selected social networks, it misses out in the key elements of friends, instant messaging, badges and tags (among others). In an overview of Berger and Trexler's additional social networks, only Qlubb appeared to be most appropriate for the district in which I teach. At the classroom level, Qlubb would particularly useful for an elementary teacher who needs class help from parents or is organizing field trips. Because of Moodle, I have no need of forum creators or a site like Mixxit, which might be a good music site for emerging artists and teens who like hip-hop.The other sites recommended might be appropriate for linking to pre-existing websites on Windows or Mac operating systems.
Berger and Trexler also comment on the AASL standards and the social aspect of learning. This brought to mind a recent post in David Warlick's blog entitled "Are they students or are they learners?"
For educators and parents who see teens as students, the one big elephant in the room that needs some discussion is the negative side of social networks that keep Facebook, MySpace and other SNS blocked in schools. Student experimentation with social identity(sexting) and social power (cyberbullying) are all part of human development, to a certain degree. Educating teens about netiquette and appropriate use of technology is more effective than out-right bans, but few districts seem to be implementing curriculum around this topic. Our district hosted an international tech-ed conference last year and is still in the process of discussing board level policies banning MP3 players, phones, digital cameras from classrooms and every school in the province is carefully monitored by the Provincial Learning Network which oversees all the public school wide area networks (WAN) to ensure that districts are not opening up the provincial network to attack through viruses or hackers.
By Beercha http://www.flickr.com/photos/vendene/4285542155/
Conclusion
Social networks are woven into the lives of nearly all our students and the lives of many adults in North America. Learning to navigate socially within the networks hosted on the web adds a layer of social complexity to the lives of teenagers and young adults, which many are just beginning to realize as they learn about their digital footprint. If learners, as opposed to students, make meaning from the various aspects of their lives, then managing social networks will have to become part of the fabric of school curricula.
"The next medium, whatever it is - it may be the extension of consciousness - will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form." (McLuhan, 1962)
Reflections on earning to use the tool.
Marshall McLuhan (born in Edmonton) was visionary in how he viewed the progress of media and how it would transform our world. YouTube from the moment it began, caught the imagination of people who wanted to share their truths with the world. While my own postings to YouTube have been minimal, due to a lack of a good (or bad for that matter) digital video camera, I have been using YouTube and Teacher Tube videos for a few years for instructional purposes. This, of course, has been hampered by district technology folks who don't want students to be able to access inappropriate videos. YouTube was blocked until this school year at my school. As a tool, YouTube is incredibly easy to use as a viewer. Put in a search term and you'll be able to pull up videos on almost any topic imaginable. It's also very easy to post videos to this site. You simply create an account and upload videos after you've determined what level of privacy you wish to maintain for viewing and comments. The site links to all social networks and videos can be uploaded from those sites as well as directly from your personal computer. Channels, which are videos linked by over-arching theme can be subscribed to as RSS feeds.
Personal Use and Learning
For the first year of using YouTube, I was a passive viewer. I surfed a little and watched pop culture mind candy. I can honestly say that I didn't use it for education at all (my own or students'). In the next year, I began to explore YouTube and Teacher Tube (which had been recommended to me as a way of getting around the block put in by techies) for useful education clips. Some were good and very useful, some were hokey and useless. I found myself more frustrated by TeacherTube and didn't use it much, but recommended it to math teachers as most of the useful clips seemed to be aimed at that department. YouTube seemed much better for finding things for Social Studies and English which could be great discussion starters or clips related to readings in those departments. I heard my colleagues more frequently discussing the need for short videos rather than the longger DVD's which made up the bulk of our video collection. The search for a good streaming video service was on!
At this time, I also realized that I needed to learn how to post videos and ran smack into two controversies. The first was the issue of privacy. After posting videos of my darling daughter in her Christmas concert, I was asked to take the video down as it showed other children who were being protected from possibly abusive parents. I simply made the video settings more private so that they could only be shared by me with specific people. The next problem I encountered was copyright around music. I knew that YouTube was getting much more careful about copyright infringement, but I was very surprised (again, at Christmas), when after posting a video of a dance lesson, YouTube posted a link to the performer's iTunes account and gave information about the song. (see below) I was surprised by this because I hadn't considered that posting a video where a tune was used for teaching purposes would constitute a breach of copyright. I had guessed it would be considered "Fair Use."
Because my daughter has Down syndrome, I've had the opportunity to see some pretty horrific posts in public settings about children and adults with Ds. Privacy settings are pretty important to me, so while I may allow a video to be public, I am very careful to disallow comments. I may miss out on the positive comments that could be shared, but I also stop the trolls out there from causing pain for me or my family.
I enjoy my YouTube account and have used it to organize videos for presentations (Anti-Hate Week at my school). I have my favourites and have videos queued for viewing when I have time to watch. I also like that I can RSS certain channels or creators to my Google Reader. I suppose that my next level of usage will be to create instructional videos for sharing or to encourage student creation of class content related videos. Now that things can be viewed without blockage, perhaps we can even create our own school channel!
Video sharing and creation sites are arguably both the most controversial and most useful tool educators and students can use in the learning environment. In 21st century skills: Rethinking how students learn, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey write "We need to change Internet-access policies (as well). Consider the greatest collection of free video content ever created - YouTube - and the fact that it is banned in most schools." This simple issue affects almost every school I know, yet the ability to easily access materials that make both teaching and learning more effective is denied to most of the education community of North America. It can be argued that Teacher Tube allows educators to get around this problem by providing videos that are created for (and by) educators, are ad-free and don't include videos that are inappropriate for the education setting. (Berger & Drexler, 2010.) This is true, but the breadth of the collection on Teacher Tube isn't sufficiently wide enough or of high enough quality to match the value of YouTube, in my opinion. Nor is Teacher Tube as user friendly and intuitive as YouTube. Ultimately, students need to be taught to deal with inappropriate content in the same way that we would hopefully educate them on how to deal with inappropriate content on the web. Richardson's anecdote about the student who came across a web page that was too mature for school, then simply backed up and made note of the page to pass on to the teacher was a model for how we should be teaching basic courtesy and appropriate use at school, rather than simply banning a tool because it may be used incorrectly. (Richardson, 2006.)
The value of sharing and creating video in the education setting is immense. Not only does it support visual learning and literacy, it encourages creative methods of expressing what has been learned. By being able to comment, viewers can encourage each other, question and extend concepts or link to other related videos or ideas.On Sunday, I took my family to visit Adams River, the home of one of the largest sockeye salmon spawning runs in the world. This year's run is estimated to be the largest in 100 years, something that couldn't have been imagined last year when there was fear that the sockeye runs may be in danger of collapse. The video taken yesterday is not only a great jumping off point for discussion in elementary and secondary classes in my province, it becomes a historical document as well. The video was easily taken with a Flip camera (borrowed from my school), and edited using the software that supports a Flip camera. With ease of use like this, movie making becomes something students can easily accomplish as well. Now if they can view what they've created during school time, then learning conversations can truly be enriched.
Photo license:AttributionShare Alike Attribution, Share Alike (jsawkins from Flickr)
If you've discovered the fun of creating video book trailers using Vimeo or Animoto (or any other video editing tool, then you'll appreciate the School Library Journal's nominees for the best book trailer. The award, called the Trailee, recognizes excellence in building excitement around a book with video technologies that are easy to use. Check out the link and vote for your favourite. Maybe next year, I'll get nominated!
Here's some of the latest gadgets for observing biometric data. Given the easy access to these kinds of apps, what use will be for educators. Do these kinds of devices have a place in our classrooms? How might teachers help students use these devices? One possible use occured to me and that was to determine when optimal learning takes place for students. What is their body setting? Does movement assist students in retaining knowledge?
I only got half-way through Buffy Hamilton's Slidedeck called "Beyond Balance: Participatory Librarianship for Creating,Connecting, Conversing and Contributing." I stopped when I had overwhelming contrary urges. The first urge was to want to throw something at the laptop screen. The second urge was wanting to dance and read something techy simultaneously. I attribute both urges to the fact that it's late on a Friday night and it's been a hellish week, both personally and in my library.
My first urge deals with the thought that has been running through my head for the last 48 hours. I'm flat-out exhausted and frankly frightened that I may be headed for a case of depression. I sat in my car yesterday and realized I didn't want to go home because going home was even more exhausting than being at work. (Our dryer went kaput and we've had 2 different plumbers in to deal with a septic system back up in our basement and my daughter is fighting a virus that I'm afraid will land her in the hospital with chest issues - again.) Balance sounds positively heavenly right now, because my life is completely unbalanced. I am certain that I am not the only person in the field going through something similar right now. I'm sure there are many t-l's who are wondering if they're going to be able to breathe anytime before Christmas. And yet.......
The second urge speaks directly to my love of my job and my passion for making the library at my school a relevant conversation! I've always believed that libraries are conversations and that learning is so central to what we do that we must be experts in all the different ways to draw people into the conversation and explore this amazing world of ideas. I get so excited thinking about the possibilities, particularly the use of technology to expand the conversation beyond the walls of the building. Buffy's use of Slide Share and the images she chose speak so powerfully to my own values, that I was bouncing in my seat...Okay, bouncing in my head. My body is too tired to bounce much right now. I envy the Minnesota teacher librarians who will get to discuss and share these images and thoughts. How energized they will be after this session. If it could be bottled and sold - I'd buy a bottle of it immediately, but I'll have to make do. I'll be sharing this with my district colleagues when we meet for the first of our monthly meetings next week. Perhaps the images will inspire me to try a few more photos at school to show the possibilities of student use of technology to my staff.
Photo by Vernon Swanpoel. Creative Commons Copyright.
It's funny how serendipitous reading can be sometimes. A friend of mine, who was trying to get me involved in her home-based business, told me that "we draw things to us that are the object of our personal focus." Universal magnetism is an interesting concept, but this week (and today particularly) have proven to be the week of "the learning curve."
In reading Scott McLeod's latest blog post, I was struck with the similarities in posts I've read from Doug Johnson and Buffy Hamilton. Everyone seems to be talking about why there is a gap between the blogosphere and the average classroom teacher (and perhaps teacher librarian). Scott's comment that "the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore." really struck a chord with me.
On Monday, my school hosted Tracy Poelzer for a Pro-D presentation on IWB's and Web 2.0 tools. (Tracy Poelzer is our district's new Technology Coordinator.) Tracy freely admitted that the topics we had chosen were huge and way too much to cover adequately in one day. In the afternoon, as we began to address Web 2.0 tools, Tracy asked how many people had an i-Google page (or barring that - a personalized start up page that showed weather, RSS feeds and personal interest info. Only a handful of the 40 or so people present had something like that. Only 15 of the staff had Facebook pages. Everyone was relatively comfortable with email and liked the district's new Zimbra program. It was clear that all the tools Tracy was about to present were new to 90% of the staff: Voicethread, iGoogle, blogs and wikis. I knew that encouraging staff to use new tools was going to be an uphill battle - we've started a new timetable this year, so everyone is busily revamping their course outlines and lessons to align with shorter blocks. Although I would look at this as an opportunity to introduce many new tools, my colleagues clearly are in the same space that Steve Dembo is talking about: they don't know there are different coloured pills to be able to choose one or the other. The other issue will be finding the time to play with the technology.
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