No more free nings

I saw a lot of sad tweets tonight about Ning's announcement from tech educators I follow on Twitter – educators who created classroom "nings" (mini, user-created social-network sites), professional-development "nings" and activist "nings." Creating a site on Ning will no longer be free, I read in CNET, "free" being just one of the service's attractions to educators (and a whole lot of other people). I remember last fall hearing a speaker at the Safer Internet Forum in Luxembourg say that soon the country's Education Ministry would be introducing Ning for teachers' social networking nationwide (see this), and tonight Steve Hargadon of Elluminate and Classroom 2.0 blogged that Ning has been "a great springboard" for educational networking. Anyway, the news broke yesterday that Ning would be "cutting 40% of its staff and axing its free, ad-supported service," according to CNET. Wrote TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid, to whom someone apparently sent the internal memo about the staff cuts from Ning's CEO (published in full on that page), "I suspect we’ll see quite a few active networks jump to whatever the cheapest premium option is," which may spell more fundraisers at schools lucky enough to have teachers setting up classroom nings! [Here's my first post about Ning three years ago, "Mini-MySpaces: New phase," with a comment from co-founder Marc Andreeson (even better known as co-creator of the first Web browser, Mosaic)!]

'21st-century statecraft' at home & school

Live on the Web, I was just listening to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton's call for 21st-century statecraft (as well as the need to protect free expression online) and couldn't help but think about how much we need to respect, teach, and model good citizenship at home and school (here and in every country) – using the media kids use and love – in order to realize Secretary Clinton's vision for Internet freedom. She spoke of the need to "create norms of behavior among states." Absolutely, but we need to start here at home, promoting and modeling norms of good behavior online and in homes and classrooms using the social (behavioral) media and technologies where so much kid behavior occurs now. I just reviewed a major study, the Kaiser Family Foundation's, about how much youth are using media, and while some are appalled at the time spent with media, are they thinking about how so much of that usage is outside of school, because we block social media and cellphones from school – leaving young people completely on their own to work out social norms? What a missed opportunity! Secretary Clinton also called on us to focus on the needs of youth. Doing so must include understanding how they use media, not just how much. Let's begin now consciously to model and teach the good digital as well as real-world citizenship and "statecraft" that will be protections to free speech, our countries, and most especially our children – at school, in virtual worlds, and all the other places where they spend time. [See also "Digital risk, digital citizenship" and "From users to citizens."]

The media shift & the TX textbook revolution

Not everybody's idea of a national news story, but an example of the media sea change we're experiencing: "In a historic shift," Texas – the US's second-biggest textbook "customer" with a multi-billion-dollar textbook budget and highly centralized curriculum development and textbook purchasing that has been in place since 1918 – is broadening its definition of "book," the Texas Tribune reported recently. Part of the definition now seems to be "a living reservoir of content, freely edited and updated by educators and beamed to the classrooms, homes and handhelds of students statewide," and some of the budget will go to laptops and e-readers. Leading up to this development, the Tribune cites three fundamental shifts of power and money: "from the State Board of Education to the Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency; from three major textbook conglomerates to a broad array of computer hardware and digital content providers; and from the state to school districts." The bottom line: School districts in Texas will actually be getting some of the state budget to make their own decisions on content, curriculum, and delivery tools, it appears. One of the top three textbook adoption states (the others being California and Florida) is acting like one-size-fits-all doesn't fit well with the way children learn, socialize, or use technology (see "Online Safety 3.0" for the Net-safety piece of that). For a bit more context: "Most states allow local school districts to buy their own instructional materials, in print or otherwise," according to the Tribune; but 22, the so-called adoption states, don't. Texas, Florida, and California together have more students than the other 19 combined, but "none has held the reigns of curriculum and money so tightly as Texas," the Tribune reports. As for book-content delivery devices – "e-readers" like Amazon's Kindle – sales are growing. According to The Economist, there are about 5 million out in the world right now, and "double that amount will be sold in 2010, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm. Apple, with its record of improving upon existing technologies and triggering mass adoption, is expected to shake up the business by launching a tablet-style computer which would make an ideal e-reader in 2010." The article's a little old, but some more great background on textbooks can be found at Edutopia.

Quest Atlantis, VWs & academic situational awareness

In a virtual world, science students can be scientists. In Quest Atlantis, students explore scientific problems or quests, so that – in addition to learning scientific content on quests – they find themselves in situations where they have to put that new knowledge to actual use. In other words they're being scientists, not just learning science. What a "science class"! Prof. Sasha Barab, one of the creators of the Quest Atlantis educational virtual world at the University of Indiana School of Education, calls this "transformational play," reports Cindy Richards at the MacArthur Foundation's "Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning." Maybe also transformational learning? [BTW, I love the term "situational awareness," feeling it has so many applications - social, academic, developmental (parenting) - online and offline. Online – like digital citizenship and media literacy – it's protective as well as promotive of academic success. Just as in Quest Atlantis, you learn what it's like actually to be a scientist or environmentalist, in social network sites you can learn what's it's like to be a good friend online and offline – what words, photo-tagging, or behavior has the potential to support or hurt others. We think about situational awareness a lot at our house. For example, some language that's common in Xbox Live is not at all appropriate in other situations, including at ice hockey practice! Developing the awareness that can make that distinction has a lot of athletic and social benefits!]

WoW: The guild effect for teachers

There are lots of good reasons why an assistant superintendent of schools would start a guild in World of Warcraft (WoW) – all laid out in a fascinating profile of the Cognitive Dissonance Guild and its educator members in The Journal this month. But the reason why Catherine Parsons, assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction, and pupil personnel services for Pine Plains Central School District, N.Y., started the guild was "to uncover education's brass ring: student engagement." A lot of teachers' professional development happens in the guild as well (the name reflects the seeming disconnect between several pairs: public perceptions of videogames on the one hand and on the other hand: 1) what videogames can teach teachers about learning; 2) what massively multiplayer online games can teach teachers about education worldwide when they're all playing a game together; 3) the members' professional development and networking; and 4) traditional or formal learning.

But the members simply aren't feeling any such cognitive dissonance, and their ranks are growing. The guild now has 100 active members around the world – all in the field of education. Here are some things they've learned about learning in WoW: The game "draws on multiple skills across multiple disciplines," higher-order thinking, and problem-solving. Players have to be able to read, communicate, and use analytical and statistical skills (e.g., a statistical comparison of one weapon vs. another). They learn economic concepts such as supply and demand and budgeting. Parsons told The Journal that the four wars going on in WoW pattern conflicts in world history. So players learn concepts involved in social studies and history and "writing and lore." She says players even use a form of statistical analysis in building their characters - what sort of talents to use, what weapons to use. She said 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old students whom teachers can't get to do "those kinds of computations" in class have no problem doing them in World of Warcraft. Tech coordinator Lucas Gillispie, who runs the WoW in School site, "took inspiration from observing that a particular herb [in the game] that allowed his avatar to go invisible was always growing in a thick clump of weeds." He thought of a lesson plan for comparing WoW ecology to real-world ecology.

My own first piece about the guild effect – in terms of online/offline well-being and safety – is here. See also "The power of play" and "Play, Part 2."

States' report card for school innovation

The US states' report card for innovation in education wasn't all bad news: For example, "Massachusetts, Colorado, and Rhode Island got gold stars for their policies to promote extended learning time in schools." But all of those states got Ds for tech innovation. The report – "Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Innovation" – was not pretty, with "most states earning Cs, Ds, or even Fs in such key areas as technology, high school quality, and removal of ineffective teachers," Education Week reports. Sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and the American Enterprise Institute, the report used "state data and existing and original research to assign letter grades to states." Technology grades were based on criteria such as teachers' technology proficiency, student access to tech, whether there are online schools in the state, and whether the state assesses return on investments in technology. Six states got As for technology: Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia. Twelve states got Bs; 14 Cs; 18 Ds (including the District of Columbia), and one – Nevada – got an F for tech innovation. A key critic of the report was the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, which said its recommendations fit with "the factory model of education." The full report can be downloaded from the US Chamber site in PDF format, and the Tech section starts on p. 46.

Filters for classroom management?

No. Really not a good use for filters, writes instructional technologist Bud Hunt at St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado, where they've been filtering less since the beginning of the school year. Hunt's thoughtful response to requests from teachers and other staff to block resources that are distractions in the classroom is that "we will no longer use the Web filter as a classroom management tool. Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them. Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem." Hunt later adds that the best filters in a classroom are the people in it. I do agree. Here's why – but don't miss Bud's complete response to technological-classroom-management requests, linked to above. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with filtering, just with uncritical use of it, or any technology. [See also "Filtering critics, issues in 3 countries."]

*Good* news involving swine flu

There just may be an upside to the swine flu: It may be the cause of more educators becoming comfortable with using interactive technology (aka social media) in the classroom. With the message that its wiki-like online collaboration tool, Office Live Workspace, can help keep classes on track if schools close for flu outbreaks, Microsoft "has launched a how-to Web site that walks teachers through the steps of setting up accounts for their classes on ... the free Web service," the Associated Press reports. Pretty much like Wikispaces.com, Google Sites, and Wetpaint's Wikis in Education, the service can be used by teachers to post assignments and handouts so that students can work on the assignments individually or collaboratively from home. According to eSchoolNews, Microsoft and other companies, such as Pearson Education, are responding to a call by Education Secretary Arne Duncan "to help keep home-bound students sick with the H1N1 flu virus connected to school."

From 'digital disconnect' to mobile learning

The real disconnect is not the one between parents and kids (that I wrote about last week). "It's the gap between how students learn and how they live! They really want to end that divide," according to Project Tomorrow, the Irvine, Calif.-based nonprofit organization that runs the annual nationwide Speak Up study.

And the disconnect is "alive and well ... and growing," was the finding of the latest Speak Up, which surveyed 281,500 students, 29,644 teachers, 3,114 administrators, 21,309 parents, and 4,379 schools in 868 districts in all 50 states and some in other English-speaking countries. "Students say they 'step back in time' when they enter the school building each morning - despite overwhelming agreement among parents, teachers and principals that the effective implementation of technology in schools is crucial to student success," Project Tomorrow says in its release of last fall's survey.

Cellphones everywhere
The Speak Up study found that about 77% of students in grades 9-12 have mobile phones (55% have access to laptops), indicating that leveraging that installed base by teaching with cellphones would be economical in terms of both time and money.

"Cell phones can be powerful computers. They can do just about everything laptops can do for a fraction of the price. And many students are bringing them to school anyway," says University of Michigan education professor Elliot Soloway.

Still, barriers to adoption remain, including adult biases against technology for "serious" use; a diversity of cellphone products in the marketplace; phones' physical features (screen size, battery life, etc.); and schools' fears about student distraction and lack of responsibility toward the equipment, according to the 2009 Joan Ganz Cooney Center study "Pockets of Potential" (here's my post on the report).

Responsible use the norm
About that last and crucial barrier, though, school districts that do incorporate cellphones and other handheld devices into classroom work find that student engagement and responsible use are actually the norm.

North Carolina math teacher Suzette Kliwer said her students are so eager to use phones in an educational setting that irresponsible use of them has not been a problem. She was one of several educators presenting their districts' experience in a recent Project Tomorrow Webinar on mobile learning. Jeff Billings, an Arizona school district's director of technology, echoed that: "When you engage students and put a pro who can guide them on the instruction piece, good things happen," he said.

How they're teaching with phones
"The mobile device is a case of digital tools at your disposal. It can provide an ultra-portable portfolio" of teacher's and students' work, said David Whyley of Learning2Go, the UK's four-year-old "largest collaborative mobile learning project," focusing on the British equivalent of grades K-6.

A recent story in USATODAY tells how Ohio students in grades 3-5 work with handheld devices. Using educational apps created by GoKnow!, a company co-founded by University of Michigan professor Elliot Soloway, they take and draw pictures, keep journals, write essays, work in spelling, and do math. "Students took the phones on a museum field trip where they took photos, uploaded them to a server where the teacher could view the assignment and wrote blurbs about what they saw," the article says.

Tech coordinator and middle school teacher Samantha Morra in New Jersey put together a program for classroom iPod Touches with which students store, produce, organize, share, and access media such as podcasts and videos, access sources on the Web, take quizzes, work with flashcards, and discuss and collaborate in different configurations of users: one on one with their teacher, in small groups, and as a class. "Students devour engaging, customized curricula when it’s delivered on the iPod. Phones are a familiar and essential part of their lives now, Morra emailed me.

How can ed add value to tech?
Which points to a question I think we all need to be asking: "It is not a question of whether these technologies add value somehow to education, but the reverse, can education add value to the communications and information technologies of our present day world, and its future?" That's from Ira Socol at Michigan State University, a comment he wrote in Saskatchewan tech educator Dean Shareski's blog, IdeasandThoughts.org. Think about how education has added value to the book! (See "School & social media: Uber big picture.")

Here's how students themselves told Project Tomorrow they want to use mobile devices to support learning: for communications (email teachers and classmates and access personal Web sites); collaborations (projects and calendars); creativity (create/share documents, videos, educational games); and productivity (research, downloads, and to get alerts and reminders).

Why mobile learning?
In its "Pockets of Potential" review of mobile learning projects in eight countries (schools in some countries are way ahead of this whole discussion), the Cooney Center lists "5 key opportunities in mobile learning." It...

1. Encourages “anywhere, anytime” learning - learning in a real-world context and bridging home, school and other environments.
2. Reaches underserved children - low-cost devices and tech many children already have, especially in disadvantaged communities & developing countries.
3. Improves 21st-century social interactions - fostering constructive and constructivist (collaborative) use
4. Fits with diverse learning environments - highly accessible communication and content-delivery devices
5. Enables personalized learning experiences for diverse student populations and learning styles.

Back in 2006, kicking off the multiyear, MacArthur Foundation-funded, $50 million Digital Youth Project, media professor Henry Jenkins wrote, "Educators must work together to ensure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, can articulate their understanding of how media shapes perceptions, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities." (my post on Jenkins's paper back then).

Related links

CellphonesinLearning.com, a site by author and learning technologies doctoral student Liz Kolb at the University of Michigan – her book is Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education

mLearnopedia.com, created by mobile learning consultant Judy Brown, formerly of the University of Wisconsin

Project K-Nect - a Qualcomm-funded program being implemented in some North Carolina public schools as "a supplemental resource for secondary at-risk students to focus on increasing their math skills through the use of smartphones" (here's the students' blog)

"Where phones in class are ok" at Inside Higher Ed

"Learning curve: Cellphone as teacher" in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"WCSA Mobile Learning K-12," a presentation by Judy Brown in SlideShare

For an online-safety perspective on the gap between young people's formal and informal learning with digital meeting, see "Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth."

Project Tomorrow wasn't the first research group to flag the digital disconnect. As I mentioned last week, Pew/Internet first wrote about in a 2002 report.

This past summer, Tech & Learning published retailer Wirefly's "Top 10 cellphones for students," looking at affordability, popularity and functionality.

Starring students: Real-world projects in virtual world

Wonder how and what students are taught in virtual worlds? Watch this video (13:46) at Teachers TV, a professional development site in the UK (which has similar videos on blogs, cellphones, and podcasting in the classroom here). You'll see how middle-school student Daniel made the case for and, "in a couple of weeks," built an exhibition of the history of steam engines in Second Life, his teacher said, and how a group of students were asked to help turn a crumbling historic jetty on the North Sea coast into a tourism destination by building and restoring it virtually, again in Second Life. "Where else on Earth could you give a bunch of youngsters the space to build Skinningrove Jetty with some stairs going up to it out into the sea?" asks one of the teachers involved. Another said, "We have some students who are very confident working by themselves but they're not so good in a group.... One of the brightest students we have tends to hide his work from the others because he doesn't want them to be copying it, whereas now he's taking more of a sharing role...." Here's more on the Schome Project for 21st-century learning, whose island in the virtual world provides space for these student engineering and building projects.

World of Warcraft, MMORPGs in school

At Peggy Sheehy's middle school in Suffern, N.Y., the introduction of World of Warcraft (WoW) is going like this: first it's the focus of an after-school club, then "others joining us will be implementing it with the 'at-risk' student population [and] the 'gifted' student group," followed by regular classes "for specific content-area projects," Sheehy, a teacher and media specialist, said in an interview at WoW.com. As a high-level player of this multiplayer online game (or MMORPG) and guild founder herself, she's been exploring what can be taught with the multiplayer online game because she has already done a lot of teaching of everything from literature to body image for a health class in and with the virtual world Teen Second Life, and she saw some new opportunities in WoW, for example the opportunity to increase student engagement by teaching within a graphically compelling virtual environment. When that happens, she says, even reading levels go up: "My kids, who are 13 years old, are reading on a sixth-grade or a fourth-grade level in school when tested, but ... if you test them with the same methodology that you would test reading a John Steinbeck novel in school ... on World of Warcraft content, all of a sudden their scores are higher." Here's a site, created by educators (a collaborative Web site called a "wiki," as in Wikipedia.org), that's dedicated to developing lesson plans and other instructional tools incorporating World of Warcraft - so far for teaching math, writing, social interaction, digital citizenship, online safety, and 21st-century skills. [See also "Play, Part 2: Violence in videogames" and "Homeschooling with World of Warcraft", and "Can World of Warcraft make you smarter?" at MSNBC (for more on the body-image project, see Sheehy's answer to Question No. 13 on this page at RezEd.org).]

Great social-media resource in Oz

Looking for nice, clear definitions of social-media tools like blogs and wikis? Check out a new resource in Australia recommended in an educators' bookmarking group I subscribe to: the Technology Guide in the Australian government's Cybersmart site. That's just one piece of a very comprehensive resource that includes online-safety advice and curricula as well. What I like about it is that it also gets at how youth use technology (it doesn't present technology as a problem). There's a "Cybersafety Help" button for Australians in the upper-right-hand corner of every page. Americans seeking such help can go to CyberTipline.com, Canadians to Cybertip.ca, and Britons to CEOP.

Why participatory media need to be in school

Writer, tech consultant, and educator Clay Shirky just gave a talk at the State Dept. explaining the media sea change we're experiencing globally. Keeping participatory media, the most fluent though not necessarily most literate users of which are youth, out of school only solidifies the firewall between formal and informal learning and holds school back from 21st-century relevance. Isn't the idea of adults unidirectionally disseminating to students info that the latter have actually never encountered before beginning to sound quaint? Doesn't helping students make sense of all the info they're gathering and think about the implications of all the info they're sharing, multidirectionally, almost 24/7, sound a little more current? Remember that old term "information superhighway"? Well, even back in Web 1.0, when the Internet was more mass-media-on-screens, it was getting to be like a "highway" for all forms of "transport." It simply can't be called either "technology" or a new medium that's being layered on top of life or school. It's technology + media + communication + producing + consuming + community and so on. It's a planet-size screen displaying, pipeline carrying, and mirror reflecting virtually all of human life. Shirky says the Net has become "the mode of carriage for all other media ... less a source of information and more a site of coordination" because people can now consume, produce and also gather 'round and talk about the info simultaneously.

So the Internet or participatory media simply can't be an add-on to what students are currently learning - just "another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers," as author and professor Howard Rheingold put it, quoted by professor Michael Wesch here. That approach would sell students, the learning process, school, and participatory culture short. They need to learn new media literacy and how to function well and civilly in community (be civically engaged, good citizens) in and with multidirectional, many-to-many social media throughout the curricula, the school day, and all grade levels. Visionaries like Rheingold, Wesch, and Shirky - and some amazing tech educators I feel so lucky to have met - show how important it is for students, as both producers and consumers, to approach participatory media in an ethical, mindful, and literate way. That's what school could do if it stops blocking participatory media: bring the rigor and enrichment of formal learning to the informal-learning that's engaging students and, in the other direction, bring the meaningfulness of informal learning to school. I ran across all three of the above links while doing some research for a talk at Purdue University this week. I hope they'll be as thought-provoking for you as they were for me.

But those are just a couple of reasons. Send yours! (Post here or in the ConnectSafely forum) - you can email me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

School & social media: Uber big picture

When I think about how the book, enabled by Gutenberg's press, was pretty controversial back in the day (15th c.) and probably didn't make it into "school" for a while (though it fueled the Renaissance and the Reformation), maybe I understand why there's resistance to using today's media - called social media - in school. But things are moving a little faster these days, and students are actively using social media anyway outside of school (books were less accessible to students in the 15th and 16th centuries than the participatory Web is today). Social media researchers tell us some amazing informal learning is going on in this out-of-school use (see the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth research findings), but what about the formal learning part - the potential for student engagement in school (and community, government, etc.) if media so compelling to students could be used in schools nationwide - not to mention the potential for schools themselves, and for the advancement of American education as a whole in this shrinking world, where the US ranks 15th in terms of per capita broadband penetration, as the Financial Times reports?

Books and literature were made so meaningful to me in AP English - in school - way back before social media. Now social media, e.g., Teen Second Life, can help schools help make literature more meaningful to students. I watched a presentation by New York educator Peggy Sheehy at NECC (the National Educational Computing Conference) last summer, showing how the courtroom scene in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was acted out by students (playing judge, jury members, DA, court reporter, etc.) in a virtual world. She said they mined that book, read every word, so they could play their roles intelligently. Here's what an educator in Connecticut writes about what's happening at Peggy's school. Other prime examples are what Global Kids is doing for students in and after school in New York City and what Digitales' digital storytelling workshops are doing for students in schools around the country (e.g., this one). The work of these educators and the visionary administrators and superintendents behind them is key to school's relevance to students as well as to American education's competitiveness in the developed world (see Appendix B of the New York-based Joan Ganz Cooney Center's study "Pockets of Potential" for classroom mobile social-media projects in 7 other countries).

But that's not all. These educators know how to increase the value of social media for youth by making new media as meaningful and enriching for them as my AP English teachers made books for me. That's a lifelong gift to students as well as to a society that can't afford to lose the engagement of its youth. Renewed relevance is also a gift to schools, of course.

Team of Rivals author Doris Kearns Goodwin tells us Abraham Lincoln was desperate to get his hands on books - any book. Today's youth probably have a comparable level of interest in all forms of social media: virtual worlds, social sites and technologies, online games, vertical-interest online communities, and all of the above on phones as well as on the Web. That presents schools with an opportunity as much as a challenge. Maybe parents, law enforcement, and policymakers can help schools shift the focus more toward the opportunity side so that school can seem less like the "prison house" referred to by British educator John Gibson (see the BBC). New media are a little scary to anyone who doesn't understand them. But then there's the promise they hold. In a way, we're back at the beginning of the Renaissance.

Schools as 'prison houses': Misunderstanding media

I'm not sure what the game of "conkers" is like but, at the gut level, UK Independent Schools Association chair John Gibson certainly resonates, probably with most parents, when he says that playing outside "as a child and taking part in activities such as putting an oily chain back on a bike, or playing conkers, exposes children to emotions such as disappointment which prepare them for adulthood," as the BBC reports. He told the Association's annual conference that "many children are living in a 'prison-like environment' surrounded by technology," according to the BBC. Part of that makes some sense - and echoes UK clinical psychologist Tanya Byron's suggestion that "kids are being raised in captivity" (see this) - but what Gibson says about technology is way too simplistic, if not incorrectly dismissive. He said, "When your life is lived through images constructed by a technical genius from Silicon Valley played on a high definition screen I just feel it will be more difficult to experience those important rehearsals for adult life." Equating virtual worlds, et al as images on a HD screen reflects a basic misunderstanding of social media as mere technology, an add-on to "real life," while social media are people's real-life producing and socializing 1) appearing on a screen and 2) extended onto the Web - not much like TV! The very "prison houses" of school and home Gibson refers to (and made so because of the fearful adult society Byron refers to) are what have made social media so compelling to youth!

Gibson told his audience, heads of independent schools in England and Wales, that they should offer children a diversity and excellence of experience to challenge the culture of technology in which they live outside school. Absolutely. But maybe word it a bit differently: to enrich, rather than "challenge," the cultures and interest groups they're participating in with the help of technology. Seems to me that, if schools could use social technologies to help teach social media literacy and citizenship, they will contribute to and enrich children's positive participation in participatory culture and society (moving full-steam ahead right now, largely without our education system). Just as school has helped make the use of books and other conventional media meaningful for youth for centuries, it can do so now with new media. [Meanwhile, the debate about whether the evolving Internet is hurting our children continues - see "Social networking infantilizing kids' brains?"]

Why technopanics are bad

Remember the predator panic? It's not over, of course - presentations with titles like "Facebook, the Sex Offenders' Catalog" and "MySpace the Predator's New Playground" (actual titles) are still being given at a time when we need to empower young social media users and their parents, not scare them to death (for more on this, see "A new online safety: The means, not the end").

Now we really need to prevent a sexting panic from developing. I really believe teens themselves will help us end the trend if they're given the facts about current child-porn laws (see "Tips to Prevent Sexting"), which hopefully will undergo revisions, where minors and adolescent behavior are concerned and criminal intent is not (see what's happening in Vermont along these lines).

"But why are technopanics bad, if there's a chance they'll scare people into safe behavior?" you might ask. For one thing because the Internet is ubiquitous, here to stay, a tool of participatory culture and democracy, and youth are its most active, fluent users - its drivers, in many ways. Young people aren't scared of technology. They know all the workarounds if we get scared and try to ban the Net from their lives. They can easily go "underground" (away from home, at friends' houses, public hot spots, using friends' very mobile connected devices, from smartphones to music and game players), which can actually put them at greater risk, because when they're in stealth mode, we're no longer in the equation, and they need us as backup in their online as well as offline lives.

And there are macro-level, national and global, reasons why panics are bad. Here's a list, a draft for which your comments and additions are welcome. Technopanics are bad because they...

Cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.

Cause schools to fear and block digital media when they need to be teaching constructive use, employing social-technology devices and teaching new media literacy and citizenship throughout the curriculum.

Turn schools into barriers rather than contributors to young people's constructive use.

Increase the irrelevancy of school to active young social-technology users via the sequestering or banning of educational technology and hamstringing some of the most spirited and innovative educators.

Distract parents, educators, policymakers from real risks - including, for example, child-pornography laws that do not cover situations where minors can simultaneously be victim and "perpetrator" and, tragically, become registered sex offenders in cases where there was no criminal intent (e.g., see this).

Reduce the competitiveness of US education among developed countries already effectively employing educational technology and social media in schools (for an international view, see Joan Ganz Cooney Center/Sesame Workshop's "Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning").

Reduce the competitiveness of US technology and media businesses practicing good corporate citizenship where youth online safety is concerned.

Lead to bad legislation, which aggravates above outcomes and takes the focus off areas where good laws on the books can be made relevant to current technology use.

Widen the participation gap for youth - technopanics are barriers for children and teens to full, constructive participation in participatory culture and democracy.

What am I missing? Please add to or comment the list - via the ConnectSafely forum, commenting here, or email to anne(at)netfamilynews.org. We are literally all in this together, don't you think?!

Related links

Prof. Henry Jenkins: "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," Fall 2006

"Living and Learning with New Media," a summary of findings (qualitative and quantitative) form the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth Project, by Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson, Fall 2008.

"Critical Information Studies for a Participatory Culture," Dr. Jenkins's list of factors that block the full achievement of a more participatory society, 4/10/09 post on his blog

The skills of new media literacy

For a bit of history, see my first item on this, "'Predator panic'," in 2006 and "The latest technopanic" last August (before "sexting" was a word), linking to Alice Marwick's definitive paper on moral panics.

"Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies," the 12/31/08 report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and my post about it

"Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context"

Social media to be required in UK schools?

UK kids may soon be taking a big leap ahead in media-literacy training. A proposed overhaul to Britain's elementary school curriculum - the biggest in a decade - was just leaked, The Guardian reports. The draft does include "traditional areas of learning, including phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic" but also requires British students to be "familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication." It divides the curriculum into six core learning areas instead of 13 subjects - a little closer, it seems to me, to what education reformer Sir Ken Robinson proposes .The plans, reportedly written by "Sir Jim Rose, the former [UK regulatory body] Ofsted chief who was appointed by ministers to overhaul the primary school curriculum, and are due to be published next month. Could this have anything to do with Birmingham University's plan to offer a master's in social media, as The Telegraph reports (probably not, but the timing's telling).

Social-media use in US schools: Study

Looking at the findings of social-media researchers, it's clear there's a growing gap between how kids consume information in school and the collaborative, media-rich way they gather and share information everywhere else. Given this, Lightspeed/NetTrekker sponsored some research to take a measure of where schools are with adoption of Web 2.0 tech such as online games, wikis, blogs, and virtual worlds (AKA virtual learning environments). The study found what we'd expect of user-driven media: In schools, too, adoption of these learning tools is from the ground up. Teachers are driving it, and their three top reasons are: to address students’ individual learning needs, engage students, and increase the accessibility of what they're teaching to their digital-native students. The study also found that, in 83% of school districts, very few or no teachers use online social networking for instruction; 40% of districts don't even allow use of social networking (I'm wondering why not Ning-style social sites that teachers create and control themselves?!); but almost half of districts have plans to allow teachers to share their content with Web 2.0 tools such as wikis (like using new-media tools to teach in old-media, top-down fashion, but it's a start). [The study's executive summary can be requested on this page.]

Cellphones in the classroom

The cellphone industry says that, in promoting mobile learning, it's making a similar pitch as that of computer makers to educators since the 1980s, the New York Times reports. "The only difference now between smartphones and laptops, they say, is that cellphones are smaller, cheaper and more coveted by students." Cellphones are now computers. Mobile carriers point to an industry-funded "study of four North Carolina schools in low-income neighborhoods, where 9th- and 10th-grade math students were given high-end cellphones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software and special programs meant to help them with their algebra studies. The students used the phones for a variety of tasks, including recording themselves solving problems and posting the videos to a private social networking site, where classmates could watch. The study found that students with the phones performed 25% better on the end-of-the-year algebra exam than did students without the devices in similar classes." A huge factor, according to the teacher who administered the program, was her students' excitement about having the phones, which "made them collaborate and focus on their studies, even outside of school hours" - though it was tough for her to spend her evening hours monitoring the students' text messaging for program violations. See also "Mobile devices 'key to 21st-century learning'" about a study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.]

Mobile devices 'key to 21st-century learning'

Kids' use of games, cellphones, and smartphones (next-generation, Web-browsing, media-sharing phones), "if carefully managed, could significantly boost their learning," Education Week reports, citing a just-released, 52-page study by a research center based at the Sesame Workshop (formerly Sesame Street) in New York. "Mobile devices are part of the fabric of children's lives today: They are here to stay,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, in a statement about the report. "It is no longer a question of whether we should use these devices to support learning, but how and when to use them." Among the report's recommendations are "investments in research and development aimed at understanding the impact of mobile technologies on children’s learning and development, including brain and behavioral functioning" and "a digital teacher corps that would train other teachers and after-school caregivers to use digital media to promote 21st-century literacy." Here's the Joan Ganz Cooney Center's blog, with links to the executive summary and full report in pdf format.