Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Five tips for seeding and feeding your educational community

Dan Hickey's recent post on seeding, feeding, and weeding educators' networks got me thinking, for lots of reasons--not least of which being that I will most likely be one of the research assistants he explains will “work with lead educators to identify interesting and engaging online activities for their students.”

This got me a-planning. I started thinking about how I would seed, feed, and weed a social network if (when) given the chance to do so. As David Armano, the author of "Debunking Social Media Myths, the article that suggests the seeding, feeding, and weeding metaphor, points out, building a social media network is more difficult than people think—this is not a “if we build it, they will come” sort of thing. Designing, promoting, and growing a community takes a lot of work. People will, given the right motives, participate in the community for love and for free, but you have to start out on the right foot. This means offering them the right motivations for giving up time they would otherwise be spending on something else.

A caveat
First, know that I am a True Believer. I have deep faith in the transformative potential of participatory media, not because I see it as a panacea to all of our problems but because participatory media supports disruption of the status quo. A public that primarily consumes media primarily gets the world the media producers decide they want to offer. A public that produces and circulates media expressions gets to help decide what world it wants.

Social media, because of its disruptive and transformative potential, is both essential and nigh on impossible to get into the classroom. This is precisely why it needs to happen, and the sooner it happens, the better.

But integrating participatory media and the participatory practices they support into the field of education is not a simple matter. Too often people push for introduction of new technologies or practices (blogging, wikis, chatrooms and forums) without considering the dispositions required to use them in participatory ways. A blog can easily be used as an online paper submission tool; leveraging its neatest affordances--access to a broad, engaged public, joining a web of interconnected arguments and ideas, offering entrance into a community of bloggers--takes more effort and different, often more time-consuming, approaches.

Additionally, while social networks for educators hold a great deal of promise for supporting the spread of educational practices, designing, building, and supporting a vibrant community of educators requires thinking beyond the chosen technology itself.

Five Tips for Seeding and Feeding your Community

With these points in mind, I offer my first shot at strategies for seeding and beginning to feed a participatory educational community. (Weeding, the best part of the endeavor, comes later, once my tactics have proven to work.)

1. Think beyond the classroom setting.
In the recently published National Writing Project book, Teaching the New Writing, the editors point out that for teachers to integrate new media technologies into their classrooms, they "need to be given time to investigate and use technology themselves, personally and professionally, so that they can themselves assess the ways that these tools can enhance a given curricular unit."

The emerging new media landscape offers more than just teaching tools--it offers a new way of thinking about communication, expression, and circulation of ideas. We would do well to remember this as we devise strategies for getting teachers involved in educational communities online. After all, asking a teacher who's never engaged with social media to use it in the classroom is like asking a teacher who's never used the quadratic equation to teach Algebra.

Anyone who knows me knows what a fan of blogging I am. I proselytize, prod, and shame people into blogging--though, again, not because I think blogging is the best new practice or even necessarily the most enjoyable one. Blogging is just one type of practice among a constellation of tools and practices being adopted by cutting edge educators, scholars, and Big Thinkers across all disciplines. Blogging was, for me, a way in to these practices and tools, and I do think blogging is one of the most accessible new practice for teacherly / writerly types. The immediacy and publicness of a blogpost is a nice preparation for increased engagement with what Clay Shirky calls the “publish, then filter” model of participatory media. This is a chaotic, disconcerting, and confusing model in comparison to the traditional “filter, then publish” model, but getting in synch with this key element of participatory culture is absolutely essential for engaging with features like hyperlinking, directing traffic, and identifying and writing for a public. In a larger sense, connecting with the publish, then filter approach prepares participants to join the larger social networking community.

2. Cover all your bases--and stop thinking locally
One of the neatest things about an increasingly networked global community is that we're no longer limited to the experts or expertises of the people who are within our physical reach. Increasingly, we can tap into the knowledge and interests of like-minded folks as we work to seed a new community.

Backing up a step: It helps, in the beginning for sure but even more so as a tiny community grows into a small, then medium-sized, group, to consider all of the knowledge, experience, and expertises you would like to see represented in your educational community. This may include expertise with a variety of social media platforms, experience in subject areas or in fields outside of teaching, and various amounts of experience within the field of education.

3. In covering your bases, make sure there's something for everyone to do.
Especially in the beginning, people participate when they feel like they a.) have something they think is worth saying, b.) feel that their contributions matter to others, and c.) can easily see how and where to contribute. I have been a member of forums where everybody has basically the same background and areas of expertise; these forums usually start out vibrant, then descend into one or two heavily populated discussion groups (usually complaining or commiserating about one issue that gets up in everyone's craw) before petering out.

Now imagine you have two teachers who have decided to introduce a Wikipedia-editing exercise into their classrooms by focusing on the Wikipedia entry for Moby-Dick. Imagine you have a couple of Wikipedians in your network who have extensive experience working with the formatting code required for editing; and you have a scholar who has published a book on Moby-Dick. This community has the potential for a rich dialogue that supports increasing the expertise of everybody involved. Everybody feels valued, everybody feels enriched, and everybody feels interested in contributing and learning.

4. Use the tool yourself, and interact with absolutely everybody.
Caterina Fake, the founder of Flickr, says that she decided to greet the first ten thousand Flickr users personally. Assuming ten thousand users is several thousand more than you want in your community, you might have the time to imitate Fake's example. It also helps to join in on forums and other discussions, especially if one emerges from the users themselves. Students are not the only people who respond well to feeling like someone's listening.

Use the tool. Use the tool. Use the tool. I can't emphasize enough how important this is. You should use it for at least one purpose other than seeding and feeding your community. You should be familiar enough with it to be able to answer most questions and do some troubleshooting when necessary. You should be able to integrate new features when they become available and relevant, and you should offer a means for other users to do the same.


5. Pick a tool that supports the needs of your intended community, and then use the technology's features as they were designed to be used.

Though I put this point last, it's the most important of all. You can't--you cannot--build the right community with the wrong tools. Too often, community designers hone in on a tool they have some familiarity with or, even worse, a tool that they've heard a lot about. This is the wrong tack.

What you need to do is figure out what you want your community to do first, then seek out a tool that supports those practices. If you want your community to refine an already-established set of definitions, approaches, or pedagogical tenets, then what you're looking for is a wiki. If you want the community to discuss key issues that come up in the classroom, you want a forum or chat function. If you want them to share and comment on lesson plans, you need a blog or similar text editing function.

Once you've decided on the functions you want, you need to stick with using them as god intended. Do not use a wiki to post information that doesn't need community input. Don't use a forum as a calendar. And don't use a blog for forum discussions.

It's not easy to start and build a community, offline or online. It takes time and energy and a high resistance to disappointment and exhaustion. But as anybody who's ever tried and failed (or succeeded) to start up a community knows, we wouldn't bother if we didn't think it was worth the effort.

Weeding, Seeding, and Feeding Social Educational Designs

This post examines the implications of a post at the Harvard Business blog by David Armano titled Debunking Social Media Myths about social business design. He points to three labor-intensive activities that are necessary for a profitable social network: weeding, seeding, and feeding. We examine these three considerations for social education design, and how they are necessary for a worthwhile social network for educators.

First some background and context. One of our primary interests here at Re-Mediating Assessment is how innovative classroom assessment practices can be shared over digital social networks. By assessment practices, we mean both particular assessments for particular activities, as well as expertise associated with those practices. Of course, we know that most efforts to create collaborative networks for educators don’t take hold (Check out the 2004 book Designing Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning by Barab, Kling, and Gray, and a special issue of The Information Society they edited for a good discussion of some pioneering efforts).

We have previously written about the value of insights out of media scholarship for thinking about the sharing of educational practices. In particular Henry Jenkins’ notions of "spreadable" practices have prompted us to launch serial posts at Project New Media Literacies introducing the idea of Spreadable Educational Practices (SEP) and to juxtapose them with the doomed distribution of centrally defined and "scientifically" validated scripts, what we label Disseminated Instructional Routines.

We are currently outlining several new proposals to expand the nascent networks that are forming around various efforts. We also want to design and test strategies for helping other nascent networks succeed by helping to foster spread of effective practices and the necessary social bonds.

Media scholars inevitably consider the for-profit nature of commercial media. Of course, not all media scholars care about markets and eyeballs, and the nature of media markets are undergoing tremendous change. In our prior posts at Project NML, Henry's descriptions of failed corporate efforts to create "viral" messages and "sticky" websites seemed to describe some of the failed efforts to create educator social networks. The point here is that educational social design can be informed by business social design.

Armano’s talk at the Conversational Marketing Summit pointed out something that is easy to underestimate: "Being social means having real people who actively participate in your initiatives." Because educators tend to be so overwhelmed by the daily press of teaching, worthwhile social education design must find ways to get teachers actively involved. And this takes resources. Building a network will require significant support at the outset, likely sponsoring leading participants to welcome newcomers and foster effective practices. As Clay Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody, the founder of Flickr said that she learned early on that "you have to greet the first ten thousand users personally.”

Here are three things that Armano says that successful networks must plan for, and what they might look like in an educational network:

Seeding: Someone has to seed a network with resources and practices that your particular users need. In the Participatory Activities and Assessment Network we are trying to build out, we will budget quite a bit of time for research assistants to work with lead educators to identify interesting and engaging on-line activities for their students. However, the participatory assessments that educators can use to implement those activities in their classrooms and refine them over time will likely have to be constructed by the research effort. So we are budgeting for that too. We will work with heavily subsidized and fully-supported lead teachers for the first year to seed the network with useful activities before bringing on less-subsidized and partly-supported teachers. Only then do we think that the network will be sufficiently seeded to expect unsupported users to start participating in large numbers.

Feeding. The network needs a steady stream of content. By content, what we mean is information--information that other participants will find useful. In our case, the most useful information will be the anecdotes and guidelines for implementing participatory activities with actual students, and sharing the "low stakes" evidence obtained from participatory assessments for improving success. For example, we view the posting of accounts, videos, and artifacts from the enactment of successful implementation as crucial content that needs to be fed to the network. It is our job to make sure that there is both a source and an audience. Our lead teachers will need help posting accounts of enactments to the network. For example, most teachers know that they themselves can't post video of their students to YouTube (as researchers we are forbidden from even thinking about doing so because of Human Subjects constraints). But there is nothing to stop us from giving the lead teachers several inexpensive flip cams and letting students post accounts of themselves to YouTube (if the school allows access; they may be better off with SchoolTube which is less likely to be blocked).

Once accounts of practice are up, it is also our job to ensure that there is an audience. In this case, we will have paired teachers up to select activities to complete with their classrooms, and then asking one of them to implement first. This first lead teachers’ posted accounts and informal guidelines will be immediately useful for to second lead teacher. One or two simple successes like this will create a powerful social bond between two otherwise isolated participants. Because this interaction will take place via public and persistent discourse in the network, the accounts will be immediately useful for other participants wishing to use the activities; this discourse will be crucial for helping that newcomer locate and access the informal expertise that is now spread across the network in those two lead teachers.

Weeding. Armano points out that productive social business design must prune content that inhibits growth. This might be the most challenging aspect of a productive social education design. This partly refers to getting rid of problematic content. One of the lessons we learned in our collaboration with Project New Media Literacies working with Becky Rupert at Aurora High School is that need for involving students in helping keep offensive or objectionable material off of school related networks. If the students find the networking activities an enjoyable alternative to traditional activities the quickly become a powerful ally in minimizing transgressions. This is crucial, as teachers simply won’t have time to do it, and will be overwhelmed with the nuanced decisions between creative expressions and those that are patently offensive.

Another important part of weeding is getting rid of stuff that does not work. As educators we have a tendency to hang on to everything and make it available to all. Thus we create a huge obstacle for other educators who have to weed through endless list of resources looking for the right one, and then implement it and hope it succeeds. Our network assumes that most web-based educational resources are not very good at fostering worthwhile classroom participation. This is not because the resources are inherently bad, but because participatory classroom culture is so challenging to attain. Our Participatory Activities and Assessment Network will start with a carefully catalogued and tagged set of activities that have been initially vetted and aligned to one or two Relevant Big Ideas (or RBIs, which in turn can be easily aligned to content standards). As lead teachers select activities for further consideration, they will be tested by research assistants before participatory assessments are created and released along with the activity. If the activities and assessments don’t foster worthwhile participation for the first two lead teachers, it will be tagged as such.

Importantly, the network will contain useful information about the nature of that “productive failure” that will be useful for others. Consider that it may well be that the activity turned out to be too easy or too hard or required too much background knowledge for the particular students. Rather than labeling the activity as “useless” it should be tagged in a way that another teacher who works with students for whom it might be “perfect” can find the activity, along with the information and distributed expertise for using it. It looks to us like building information systems for accomplishing this will be one of our major challenges.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

on social networking guidelines for teachers

I was recently directed to a recent post on a blog called "Blogg-ed Indetermination" offering a first pass at a set of guidelines for using social networking tools in the K-12 classroom.

The blog's author, Steve Taffee, points out that while young people are taking to social networking "like ducks to water," adults are more conflicted about the appropriate uses for social networks in schools. He offers up a set of nine guidelines, not intended to be the final word but intended to start a conversation "in the best of social networking tradition." With this impulse in mind, I'll repeat the proposed set of guidelines and offer my suggestions for refinement.



Proposed Guidelines for Use of Social Networks by School Faculty and Staff*

New technologies, such as social networking tools, provide exciting new ways to collaborate and communicate. Nevertheless we must exercise care to be sure we use such tools with students in ways that are both age-appropriate and consistent with the mission of the school.

School faculty and staff are expected to behave honorably in both real and virtual (online) spaces. Activities which are improper, unethical, illegal, or which cause undue discomfort for students, employees, parents, or other members of the school community should be judiciously avoided in both physical space and cyberspace.

To that end, we offer the following guidelines for school employees who use online social networking applications which may be frequented by current or former students.

1. COURSE USE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING: In order to provide equal, age-appropriate access for students to course materials, faculty should limit class activities to school-sanctioned online tools. New social networking tools and features are being continually introduced which may or may not be appropriate for course use. The same care must be taken in choosing such tools as other tools and support materials.

2. MODEL APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR: Exercise appropriate discretion when using social networks for personal communications (friends, colleagues, parents, former students, etc.) with the knowledge that adult behavior on social networks may be used as a model by our students.

3. FRIENDING ALUMNI: Accept social network friend requests only with alumni over the age of 18. Do not initiate friend contacts with alumni.

4. UNEQUAL RELATIONSHIPS: Understand that the uneven power dynamics of the school, in which adults have authority over former students, continues to shape those relationships.

5. OTHER FRIENDS: Remind all other members of your network of your position as an educator whose profile may be accessed by current or former students, and to monitor their posts to your network accordingly. Conversely, be judicious in your postings to all friends sites, and act immediately to remove any material that may be inappropriate from your site whether posted by you or someone else.

6. GROUPS IN YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK: Associate with social networking groups consistent with healthy, pro-social activities and the mission and reputation of the school, acting with sensitivity within context of a diverse educational environment in which both students and adults practice tolerance and accept competing views.

7. PRIVACY SETTINGS AND CONTENT: Exercise care with privacy settings and profile content. Content should be placed thoughtfully and periodically reviewed to maintain this standard.

8. MISREPRESENTATION: Faculty who use social networks should do so using their own name, not a pseudonym or nickname.

9. PUBLIC INFORMATION: Recognize that many former students have online connections with current students, and that information shared between school adults and former students is likely to be seen by current students as well.

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*Some of the ideas for this list come from a Facebook group I belong to, Faculty Ethics on Facebook. It is geared towards higher education, and so if you stumbled upon this post and really want to read about colleges and universities, head on over to Facebook. I also appreciate colleague Matt Montagne’s feedback via Google Docs on an earlier draft of these ideas.



In general, these guidelines offer a strong starting point for discussing the ethical dimensions of participation in social networking sites, both in the classroom and outside of it. The drive toward modeling honest, responsible networking activities makes good sense, especially in a world where faculty can lose their jobs and their careers for the material they post online. But these guidelines present strategies that have the potential to limit teacher and student access to authentic participation in online social spaces. Specifically, the slant against "misrepresentation" and toward using only approved social networking sites in schools present significant participation concerns. For teachers, the issue is about their right to engage meaningfully in a public sphere that may offer the potential for inappropriate or damaging material. For students, the issue is more drastic: It's a matter of social justice. Students who don't have access to new media technologies and can't experience the authentic online social spaces in the classroom will be ill equipped to experience those spaces when they leave school.

On "Misrepresentation"
The push toward "honesty" goes perhaps a few steps too far, overlooking the fact that engagement with media platforms that are increasingly persistent, searchable, and replicatable call for new approaches to disclosure. I'm pointing here to guideline 8, which Taffee labels "misrepresentation."

Anonymity and its close cousin, pseudonymity, have a long and storied relationship with the politics of identity performance. We've come a long way (we have, haven't we?) from the time when speaking up against a tyrant could lead to personal, financial, or social ruin. (We have, haven't we?)

But until recently, "misrepresentation" was generally viewed as the domain of the whistleblower, and members of everyday culture were expected to act in their own names. In a participatory culture, however, where people can increasingly engage with identity play in a wide range of online spaces, psuedonyms, nicknames, and even complete anonymity serve as a buffer against repercussion. Indeed, it may be the case that a teacher wants to use Facebook or a similar site to engage in NSFW conversations, photo sharing, and precisely the kind of social networking that these sites afford. In that case, the teacher might choose to design a "fake" profile in order to prevent students or students' parents from encountering this material. It's not "misrepresentation" so much as it's a version of protected self-presentation.

As our social lives increasingly occupy online spaces in addition to offline, in-person relationships, we need to offer new strategies for engagement with these sites--strategies that afford full participation in addition to protecting people from the risk of having material intended for one audience dragged into the public light of a different, unintended audience.

On Course Use of Social Networking

The impulse driving guideline #1 is a valid one. It is, as Lynn Sykes, a teacher and friend, pointed out to me, a great big social networking world out there, and the minute we introduce social media into the classroom we also introduce the risk that learners will stumble upon material that is inappropriate for the classroom setting.

But ignoring this risk doesn't make it go away; indeed, it leaves many students ill-equipped to make intelligent decisions about what to do when they encounter this kind of material in real life, as they are certain to do. Learners who have access to social media and adult support for reflecting on their engagement with it in their homes will be prepared, of course. It's the learners with less access and less extracurricular support--in other words, the poor, the disadvantaged, the learners who have historically been left behind in school, in work, in life--who can most benefit from the experience of engaging with social media in the classroom.

This isn't to say that the concerns about inappropriate material aren't valid concerns. This is why we need to work in two distinct directions:
  • Working at the policy level to develop regulations that allow for safe and guided access to the authentic social media experiences that will prepare learners for engagement with the participatory media, practices, and cultures that are becoming increasingly essential to success outside of school;
  • Working in the classroom to establish norms that can govern students' ethical participation in social media, such that they can immediately identify, and know how to respond to, material that's inappropriate for the school context.

Steve, I would recommend including the above guidelines into a revised version of these guidelines. I'm looking forward to continuing this important conversation.