Personally I was skeptical about the notion that a learning style might be generational. The digital natives, digital learners, net generation and all that has been a mildly useful motivator or reasoning in teacher training, but I never truly believed it was a valid.
That’s because I have not been in a classroom setting with a bunch of teenagers for a while. A bit over a year and a half to be precise. And its also because down here in deep dark Dunedin there is very little broadband and so I surmise that that would mean there would be very little power Internet use amongst the kids. That was until today, when I subbed a class for the Travel and Tourism Department. I was to teach research skills to a bunch of teenagers! To be honest I was sweat’n it.. how the hell was I gunna make this interesting?
But first, a video sent by Gary Sewell through the TALO email list:
So, 20 minutes before class I set up a wikispace starting with the following sentence:
Researching together is more effective than researching alone.
Did you like that? I like that, and they did too! Phew, great start. Now for my mistake. After briefly outlining what a wiki is and how it might be useful for researching together, I told them about the edit button. Boom! faster than I could click edit and save, the wiki was deleted! Surprised but not flustered I showed them the history and it didn’t take long (about 3 minutes) for someone to work out how to revert it. I had to double check at this point. “hands up who has used a wiki before?” no hands…! Just intuition
This little hiccup disrupted the group a little and there was a lot of noise and fiddling going on. I managed to get them collectively focused on the first question: “what might we need to research in tourism?” To try and control the edit conflicts, I had one person take notes from the suggestions. As usual it was hard to get people to speak up, but we got there with some age old teaching tricks. The notes went in and the edit clashes kept happening. Big lesson - don’t point out the edit button too early 
After we got a few examples in there, I referred to the list of search sites and content repositories I and put in there earlier. I asked them to use this list to search for good links and resources related to the research examples we had brainstormed. If they found anything of interest, they were to come back and paste in the wiki with a sentence explaining the link. At this point I became aware of the 3 international students in the group using their translator computers LOL I set the rest of the group to task and went to the internationals for further explanation.
It is this task that needs following up. Search techniques, remaining focused, how to drill down and assess the social links, finding the motivation and techniques to look carefully. I didn’t labour on any of this and observed with joy the kids having fun pulling up silly youtube movies, doing flickr image searches, and some making serious attempts. I knew that they knew that anything I set them to do was going to be a one off, so I saw no reason to attempt to keep them on any hypothetical task at the expense of more engaging discovery fun. I just wanted them to be exposed to it all. And I really wanted to see the extent of their digital native-ness. And boy was I amazed!
Within minutes they had worked out how to embed the Youtube movies into the wiki. Somehow GoogleMaps came up and I showed them CommunityWalk. At least 4 in the group started up their own CommunityWalk map. Others started up their own wikispace and I walked around trying to clarify some of the chaos and confusion in the air.
It was amazing to watch! Within 40 minutes this group of 12 or so had experimented with more information and communication technology than I have managed to get any group of 12 teachers to do in 12 months!!
Our librarian Wendy2.0 was there to observe. I bet she was a bit skeptical by the lack of focus on research skills, and maybe a bit concerned that the class was wild and going in all sorts of crazy directions at different times, probably leaving behind maybe 4 of the group. I know I was a little concerned, but what could I expect? But I did get the sense that the group had been exposed to something they hadn’t seen before, and that they understood the possibilities - as a group. That their energy (if nurtured and maintained) will over time find a constructive way to use these tools in their study, and the 4 will pick it up like most people do in such socially active learning environments like this group.
But this will require follow up. The regular teacher will need to be aware of this class activity (they did not come to the class!), the learning support guys need to be at the ready to work on some of the fixable problems that emerged from this session.. such as focus, search techniques, drilling down etc. But those teachers are not ready! It will honestly take them a year to understand what these kids intuitively grasped in minutes!! This is a scary thought!
We need the students to teach the teachers!!
Like I said, I was skeptical to begin with. I’m a believer now! We teachers have got to get happening! Make sure you check out the furious history of that class wiki.
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May 10, 2007 at 2:38 am
Wendy Ritson-Jones
Hi Leigh,
I tried to go with the flow, and got swept away in the torrent! It was an exciting class, and you’re correct they now need to focus on some good search techniques/skills (yeah, it’s the librarian in me). The four, possibly five, who were struggling to keep up (like myself), will catch up I’m sure with a bit more time and tutoring from their peers. The rate at which most of the students were picking things up was amazing, and a bit scarey. I agree with you if this spirit and energy is channelled in the right way there could be some very exciting collaborative research done. I think they were all impressed that they could contribute, and were more than willing to do so. I agree that the class and teacher need to follow up on this session. It was a great springboard, I don’t think it mattered that you didn’t inlcude copyright issues, research skills etc. etc. in that session. It was just great to see so much enthusiasm. The other stuff can come in later sessions, where they can pull it all together. I’m just a bit worried that I’m not ready for it, never mind the teachers! I want my sessions to be just as exciting!!
May 10, 2007 at 3:06 am
daveb
leigh. Google works in mysterious ways sometimes - this spat out when I was looking for something completely different.
re: broadband being rare down here - all but 2 of my Dunedin students have it, I don’t know what you’re meaning about very little broadband. And they are all around Dunedin. Rural is a different matter. I don’t think Dunedin’s uptake is lower than NZ in general (which admitidly is pretty crap)
That vid has been doing the rounds a bit. Well produced with a lot of fluff, emotion but little rational argument e.g. “students use internet therefore we should use internet to teach” is the exact same reasoning as saying “students drink a lot of beer therefore we should have beer in the classroom”. Yes I’m being flippant - but it really is a false justification and is more about hype than anything really.
Any time I see things like this proposing silver bullets I get bored and turn off. While there is ANY fascination with the tools (e.g. internet, user-generated content, blogs, wikis etc) there will be as much mis-use and non-productive classroom activity as anything good. There will be busy-work but little learning. Finding a howto via google is only a tiny step towards being able to perform the activity.
Show me a means of getting students to learn something quicker & deeper or something that causes students to think more, deeper, differently (at all?) and I’ll start to pay attention.
But that is never achieved because of technology, rather it’s all about how technology is used (including technology such as a whiteboard pen and discussion)
May 10, 2007 at 3:28 am
leighblackall
Gday Dave. I wonder if you read Wendy’s comment before yours. Wendy observed the class and I thought she would have offered the balanced view that you are trying to represent. I think that if I had the luxury to establish a relationship with this class, and not be in a one off situation, I could get them to apply themselves in the way you allude to - but with more power and reach in my view.
If the fluff is false - can you give me a better counter than the flippant beer one? That movie is not proposing a magic bullet. It is proposing about 30 actually, and then the website has countless. Sure, many (but not all) of them are Internet mediated. Its magic bullet singular is actually the changing teacher thinking (and learner expectations of teachers) but thinking of the Internet as a single thing, a magic bullet is false, I agree! The Internet has many many things within it. Not in the least perhaps, connectivism.
May 10, 2007 at 5:23 am
daveb
I meant that the logic of the argument is false. Not that the “fluff” was true or false. I only saw two elements to that movie. A false argument (technically I guess it was an argument based on false cause) and an appeal to emotion (THAT part was the “fluff”). The beer anaology was to try and demonstrate that the logic was false. The message may or may not be true but the argument that is used by the movie is false.
My comment was mainly on the movie not your teaching or relationship to the class. The only message I got from that section was that you were teaching wikis in order to teach wikis [shrug]. There’s a place for that, and it’s a reasonable medium for report writing skills, critiquing etc (as long as THOSE skills are taught - without which wiki’s are just a time and net filler). I’m glad Wendy found it fun and exciting.
My objection to the “silver bullet” comes when people actually think that the current fad and fashion (which will eventually be mainstream) is somehow going to take care of students learning. If someone is totally pushing any technology (whether electronic whiteboards, blogs or video conferencing) then they loose me because they have usually forgotten what it is that they are using the tool to teach. What were the learning objectives again?
May 10, 2007 at 7:10 am
Leigh
yeah, of course. To use the class I experienced as an example (and I’m not at all sensitive about my teaching abilities) the learning objective was “research skills”. That was the only directive I was given unfortunately, so from that I reinterpreted the objective into collaborative research skills. I just so happened to use a wiki as an experiential device in the class to demonstrate that. The energy in the group however, then started to change the direction as they played around a bit with the device and so the experience, finding other things, breaking the wiki, fixing it, they mucked around with a whole bunch of other media, with me in the background actively relating it to the one liner I was pinning things to = “Researching together is [or can be] more effective than researching alone.”
I don’t disagree with you at all Dave. Focus is needed. I’m not sure if that movie was trying to make the argument you say it was though, but it was certainly trying to motivate teachers - at the very least to look at their website. I agree that the movie comes from a largelytechnological determinist perspective, and so I wonder if you would agree that human behavior is largely determined by the technology we use? If so, is teaching and learning affected by that? Reading through the wikpedia article while thinking about this question is kind of interesting. What then would you make of this movie: The Machine is Us/ing Us
I’m not sure myself, and haven’t spent a great deal of energy thinking about it either, but I do find myself agreeing with techno determinist’s more than not.
May 10, 2007 at 7:31 am
Leigh
Reading through the techno determinist article in wikipedia I found the link to Freenburg’s Democratic_rationalization. I found it much more interesting, and would probably point to it as something to think about in this discussion before pointing to determinism…
May 10, 2007 at 9:05 pm
daveb
I suggest you watch that video again and pay attention to what it is saying rather than just think “yes I agree”. Here’s some quotes:
“Students are digital learners. Here’s why, today’s average college graduates have spent over 10,000 hours playing video games, 10000 talking on a cellphone”. Then goes on and on with other “reasons” why students are digital learners.
He’s making a statement and then claiming proof by identifying something that students do which happens to be in line with what he’s talking about. However those items are in no way a cause of “digital learning” they are NOT a “why” students are digital learners. Just because students play a video game doesn’t mean they learnt a thing (except how to play a video game), any more than stating the number of hours the average college graduate has spent in a bus is a good argument to buses being a good learning environment, or measuring the consumption of beer. Now - some video games and simulations can be educational. But not the ones I play, or the ones I hear my students talk about.
That movie is well produced fluff.
As for technology shaping thinking … it has a part to play but the problem with the technologoical determinisim and many other similar approaches (remember McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message”?) is that it ignores the impact of the existing environment, culture, and totally ignores any cognitive science (they usually ignore any science or evidence completely).
Technology shapes us, but not in isolation and very very seldom in the direction which futurists speculate when they look at the potential of a technology without considering the existing culture which will influence the change. If Toffler had an ounce of accuracy then by now everyone over the age of 30 would be a gibbering idiot locked in an institution for their own protection suffering from future shock. Most such speculators about as accurate as a poor student on a multi-choice test; they all get SOME things right, but you shouldn’t let that fool you into believing their ideas.
the movie “the machine is using us” is fun interesting and wrong. There is a reason why hypertext has never proven to be a useful learning tool. It’s been around for a LONG time now (hypercard was cool). It turns the learner into a channel surfer in which they glance at many things and seldom absorb anything. It’s a cool thought, I fell for it for a while, but in the end it simply doesn’t work.
Regardless of culture, I think we are innately, genetically, a linear processing animal. Even multi-tasking is difficult (for both genders) and is a prime reason for stress over a long period. We’re simply not built for it.
BTW - if you think hyper-textual learning tools are productive for learning then prove it. It’d be an easy paper if you can get two groups of students to learn the same complex topics using both methods then test the result and compare. You’d think if it was so successful then the education literature would be full of such evidence - there have been lots of advocates over the last few decades. But nope, the advocates orate and speculate but they haven’t got many convincing success stories.
May 10, 2007 at 9:44 pm
leighblackall
I used to believe in linear. I used to argue passionately for learning resources to be more linear, to reflect the other screen we were all so comfy with - TV and cinema, and to mimic the linear mode of the traditional learning experience. I used to create Flash learning resources, videos, and the like along this thinking also. I still do. Here’s a handy 10 minute how to vlog from a teacher showing other teachers how to create videos to demo skills. Just one recent addition to thousands posted every month! I think you are right, most people prefer simplified linear learning experiences and that multi tasking, or hyper text realities create too much stress for them, and while under stress - not much measurable learning gets done.
But then I immersed myself in “web2″. All my teaching colleagues in TAFE NSW did as well. We discovered substantial benefits to our professional development. When we had a reasonable handle on it, we experimented with it in class. We set up blogs each, and asked our students to create or use their own blogs to record what they were doing. We actively networked their (and our) blogs with other similar blogs and projects being recorded online. We wanted our students to develop networked learning abilities. To be able communicate effectively and asynchronously online. To distribute their learning load across a collaboration and bring it all together around a collab project. Nothing new, its done in trad classrooms often, and its been done through email and lists before - but the intense use of DIY multi media, control of personal space and online identity, and the wider and more diverse connections with people.. that was new. At least in our little TAFE Campus it was. The limits of their media stimulation was always there and there was never any hope or intention to go beyond that. It simply is a physical limitation. But what we did achieve were learning networks that still exist today, long after the course ended. Teachers and students talking and working with other teachers and learners (online) and collaboratively working towards a list of shared goals. Maintaining those networks beyond the life of that project and into other professional roles. This stuff is difficult to measure, and not comparable to straight learning outcomes. Here’s an example course resource that continues to be developed by the teachers and students of this story. The learning networks are enhanced extra curricula activity that support the core curricula activities represented in this resource.
Here’s one paper that makes some of the analysis you are asking for. It was/is an Australian project that measured the learning outcomes of baking students in trad classrooms against baking students in tech enhanced situations like the story above…
May 10, 2007 at 10:46 pm
daveb
yes course resources exist - but do that produce results (ie students learn better/deeper/quicker)? I’ve yet to see that. It looks like we’ve both swapped sides from where we started.
I’ve used collaboration and seen it work well to produce stuff - but then have students complain that it wasn’t fair that I examined them on stuff that was done by their team-mate.
I don’t see anything non-linear in that choclate study. Looks like stock standard traditional distance learning to me, I mean looks like GOOD standard distance. I’ll have to re-read it on a day when I’m not racing against nz post to create cd’s etc
May 11, 2007 at 1:09 am
leighblackall
Swapped sides
maybe we have…
The blended chocolate project used the Internet a lot. Blogs, email, rich media website. The standard distance ed component being the rich media website. The other stuff being the communications and possibly the collaboration.
As for the web design resource. I think the key difference there is that it was built in part by the students studying the course. The teacher has a hell of a lot to do with it though.
The little how to video though.. I think it is the down to earth application of that “fluffy” video. In it you see photos of trades training using mobile media and you hear good reasoning as to why they use such devices. Perhaps the feeling you got from the fluffy video is cultural? It was American after all, and we all cringe at the corny emotional ques in a lot of American cultural content. So maybe that little how to video will appeal to you more - its Australian made so it not entirely free of hype, but it was made be a teacher with more possibly the same concerns as you.
But thanks for coming back Dave, and prompting me to extend and consider this stuff more. If you hadn’t I would have just left it at my initiate post/thoughts.
May 11, 2007 at 4:08 am
Wendy Ritson-Jones
Just a quick response…sorry you guys lost me on the technological determinist and connectivism discussion, so I won’t try and make any comments there. (LOL)
Dave- regarding the video-I watched it too, and we have similar feelings about it. See my comments at http://wotsitabout.blogspot.com/2007/04/several-useful-finds-this-week.html. I agree with you, that it is how the technology is used that makes learning effective, and I think that’s where Leigh comes from too, as well as encouraging people to look at the new tools.
Regarding the class- as I saw it, the technology was presented as a new tool to encourage collaborative research amongst the students. Much of the learning in this session was about the technology itself and new places to find information. The students were so enthusiastic it was amazing. For me what needs to happen now is to harness that enthusiasm in the classes that are to follow, and focus them on learning the research skills, and keep them engaged. Doing this collaboratively with the students explaining how they found information, and why they chose to use the information, would be a good way for the students to learn from each others experiences. They could challenge each others findings and explain why. Of course this could be done without the technology, but it would be my bet (based on what I observed) that the students would participate more if they were using the wiki they had already started to create. It would be interesting to know what the students thought. I have other thoughts but they’ll have to wait for another time to get an airing!
May 11, 2007 at 5:06 am
daveb
wendy - that’s a 404 error on that link.
my comments really were about the video, not about the classroom episode. Except for my caution that wiki’s are just another medium and shouldn’t be the focus - rather the content and writing. But yeah time for a weekend.
June 4, 2007 at 2:36 am
Not So Distant Future » Teaching “kismet”
[...] pointed to Leigh Blackall, who first shared the video, and who also came up with this great quote to convey the usefulness [...]