THURSDAY ROUNDUP

Overcast Gainesville Winter via csessums/flickr

Online Tools and Citizen Engagement

Blue Light Special

In a recent post on the AIR-L (air-l@listserv.aoir.org), Susanna Haas Lyons, Public Participation Specialist and Senior Network Associate with America*Speaks*, shared a host of online tools for citizen engagement that are worth re-gifting.

Civilizing Ourselves

Path Across

One important side effect of social networking, user video, and app-based interactions has been the empowerment of consumers. Pro-regulatory advocates worry about what giant content providers such as Google or access companies including Verizon and Comcast might do in a future absent government intervention. But I have faith that consumers, users, and citizens increasingly have the tools to make their views known and effect change when necessary—quickly and effectively.

Early on, unfortunately, we may also have to endure episodes of digital mob rule, with all the negative consequences that go with it…. But over time, the posse and the hanging tree gave way to local sheriffs and circuit-riding judges. The frontier civilized itself.

– Larry Downes, author of The Laws of Disruption & Unleashing the Killer App

excerpted from Save the Internet by Doing Nothing: Governments should butt out of Internet regulation, because the Internet will civilize itself.

The Politicization of Education and the Future of Reform: An Invitation to Action

So what is wrong with America’s public schools?
For the sake of argument, I will over simplify the setting for a moment.

Ask a politician and you’re sure to get answer based in statistics.
Ask a school administrator and the answer will lead you to dollars.
Ask a teacher and the answer will probably involve particular people.

The idea of there being a problem associated with America’s schools is really a matter of perspective. The majority of the population has attend some school and have an idea of what school is and how it effected them. This experience alone entitles the person to speak critically of education and schooling. This does not necessarily insure expertise on schooling and can lead to many false arguments. For many politicians, addressing school reform at a national policy involves selling something. For the rest of us, that means we will need to buy something that involves little if any real choice.

Politicians

Bandwagon
From a political perspective, school reform is a tale about clothing and fashion. The fashion industry is built on an ever changing, fickle mood. What’s in style today, is out of style tomorrow. The beautiful thing about this from the fashion industry perspective is that they are aware of this. They are aware that the publics taste for new, fresh, bold, practical, daring, sophisticated, charming, elegant, changes season to season. Some politician’s have picked up on this and offer school reform. School reforms are trendy, competitive, business minded, with winners and losers. A yummy carrot to the good, a nasty pink slip to the bad.

Yet, if we look closely, the tale of school reform has been told for ages, in many languages. It involves “the story of two weavers who promise an Emperor a new suit of clothes that are invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, a child cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!””
And he isn’t. Even one with limited experience and wisdom can understand this.

Bottom line
So what are schools all about?
Before anybody can speak meaningfully about what’s best for schools, we need to have some level of agreement on what the goals of schooling should be(come). For hospitals, it’s patient care. For schools, it’s often student achievement.

If the purpose of schooling is student achievement, the question is: what does that look like?
To a politician, it looks like statistics.
To a school administrator it looks like dollars.
To a teacher it boils down to test scores.

Testing
Let’s take the importance of students care off the table for a moment, and talk about test scores. Test scores can be useful. They are snapshots; they capture a moment. They document and preserve what we know about student achievement. In toto, a student record is like a series of snapshots all showing and demonstrating different forms of intelligence and creativity. Like hospitals, schools conduct hundreds of tests on their “patients,” documenting and diagnosing issues, as well as creating plans to promote health, success, and well-being. So much depends on how tests and scores are used. If they are used to diagnose and inform rather than shame and reduce students, then we are moving in the right direction. If we want to use current high stakes test scores to indicate academic achievement, then we need to rethink how schools are organized and to what end. Not an easy job. Boiling down school’s purpose to achieving test scores might strike one as dubious. Especially if positive test results lead to increased pay for educators. (See RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.)

Get Local
For schools, so much depends upon the conditions in which they operate. And unfortunately, institutions often try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution (Shirky, 2008). Politically, school reform should be a grass-roots concern. However, if the grass is unhealthy, the community offers little value. In the absence of this support, what fills the gap? Often in this case, state and government policy, arguably offering some value, provides an operational structure to guide a school. But in this policy, it is important to understand in what ways can the community be involved to build and sustain a healthy school? Can something be done to insure strong community spirit and support for local schools? Or does that spirit need to come from outside formal government accountability structures?

INITIAL TAKE-AWAYS

People first
Schools need strong people. People with strong organizational and communication skills. Schools need people with content knowledge, but more importantly, schools need people who can show how to learn, how to discover, how to observe, question, design, document; how to share the love and appreciation of knowledge and skills. Without people like this, schools will suffer, communities will suffer, and kids will suffer. No doubt.

New stories
For some politicians, the goal is create a nationwide political campaign to “put a face” on the price of failures in the U.S. education system (Like-minded: Reform advocates Rhee, Bush, Podesta talk politics of education, Harvard Gazette, November 22, 2010). Is this the story that truly represents our schools?

What if we thought of the school as a human body (the school as patient).
What do schools need to be healthy?
What does a healthy school diet look like?

If a story is needed, who will tell it? You or a politician.

Organizing without organizations
What is your school’s story?
What vision does your school have?
Who’s inside?
What can be learned from each other and the community?
Can we set up a system for schools to tell their story?
Connect them to a grid so resources can be shared easily?
A space where feedback is available, where networks could share, collaborate, publish, celebrate? A space where research connects and supports practitioners?
Could this be done in an authentic manner?

Invitation to action
Is there an organizational structure that can support such a network?

Want to get something started? (Ever use Meetup?)

Let me know. @csessums or csessums@gmail.com

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Image source: John Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Using Participatory Media to Produce an Art Show

Recently I was thinking about ways to connect my classroom to the larger world outside our door. I noticed each morning on my way to work, a beautiful space in my building that was not being used for anything. Long corridors of empty wall space. Aha! A perfect space for an art show.

I created an assignment for my integrating new digital media into the curriculum course as a way of getting students to use social/participatory media to share, communicate, create, organize, collaborate, and network focusing on a specific project/problem: creating, organizing, advertising,and managing, a showing of art that they themselves create (see assignment for details).

But there’s a catch: once I introduce this lesson to the class, they are not permitted to talk about it in the classroom physically. They must use social media tools to support the planning, communication, coordination, and co-production of the show.

Sound like fun?

The is art show is part project part celebration, and part teachable moment. Photography and poetry provide ways for us to see things differently, with fresh eyes and an enlightened awareness. Teachers play an important part in helping others see the world through new and different lens’ to take advantage of the creative energy we share [see flow]. Community projects like an artshow require the use of many important participatory skills. Such project-based learning permits a classroom to act and learn through experience, placing ownership of the learning in the participants hands. Event planning, organization and communication will take place outside of the formal class environment using social media [Twitter/Facebook/Blogs].

This art show is a pro-social initiative designed to connect learning, schools, students, teachers, administrators, family, community, peers, and friends with and through digital media. In addition, utilizing digital, participatory media allows us to connect our learning and experience with others interested in participating in similar initiatives.

Wanna rock this party? Your thoughts and comments are encouraged.

img: http://6.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_komzzf3dpc1qzpnf0o1_500.jpg

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License.

Empathy: An Overlooked 21st Century Skill

Recently I was reflecting on the skills we want our kids to possess as they enter adulthood and participate actively as g/local citizens. Here are two major skill sets defined by Henry Jenkins, et al., and Tony Wagner:

Jenkins, et al. (2006) 21st Century Skills (pdf)

• Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Tony Wagner’s seven survival skills

• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Collaboration and leading by influence
• Agility and adaptability
• Initiative and entrepreneurial-ism
• Effective oral and written communication
• Accessing and analyzing information
• Curiosity and imagination

As I look over these lists, I noticed one important skill was missing: empathy.

Empathy can be defined as “a sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself.” This is an important skill to posses as it permits us to work toward understanding perspectives and points of view different from our own. Empathy is an important social and emotional skill that requires us to practice listening, another important skill that can be easily overlooked as well. Empathy is also a function of cognitive maturity; that is, the ability to take another’s point of view requires a certain degree of cognitive complexity. In this sense, perhaps empathy falls under discernment wherein we learn how to detect feelings, ideas, sensations with our senses.

In look back over distance education literature, Holmberg (1996) noted what he called “the empathy approach.” Through empathy Holmberg suggests that “feelings of personal relations between student and teacher promote motivation, study pleasure and effectiveness” (Holmberg, 1996, p. 489). Such relations Holmberg insists involve a personal style of presentation by the teacher that engages students emotionally, asking them to share their personal reactions, views and experiences. Similarly, in Daniel Goleman‘s (1995) work on emotional intelligence, empathy is defined as a critical facet of social awareness and a key component to an overall feeling of success in life.

In light of such examinations, I feel that we should consider including empathy in our list of 21st century skills as a distinct category. Goleman’s (1995) research suggests that empathy is positively related to intrinsic motivation and effective problem-solving. The need for empathy is increasingly important in the workplace where teamwork and social competencies are a critical factor in success. Similarly, globalization, and the challenges associated with intercultural relationships, make empathy a important managerial competence.

References:
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Holmberg, B. (1996). On the potential of distance education in the Age of Information Technology. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2(6): 484-491.

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Wagner, T. (2009). The global achievement gap : why even our best schools don’t teach the new survival skills our children need–and what we can do about it. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Image: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/51/106509125_d686615fff_o.jpg

A Simple Definition: Web 2.0

Recently a colleague asked me how I might define Web 2.0 (two point oh). Since I always like a challenge, the first thing I thought about was my dear old dad.

Even though my father worked on computers when 8K was the size of a refrigerator, he is not much for jargon. In conversation recently, I dropped the word “wiki” into a sentence. He then asked, “What’s a wiki?”

My first reaction was, “Oh lawd, I’ve forgotten that I live in this techie bubble! I need to remember to speak in plain English.”

While I am aware of many resources that speak of “user generated content,” I am wanting to approach this definition from a more concrete base. At the risk of over simplification, here’s what I’ve come up with so far. Let me know what you think and/or how I might improve upon this working definition.

Web 1.0 = me
Web 2.0 = me + you

Web 1.0 = read
Web 2.0 = read + write

Web 1.0 = connecting ideas
Web 2.0 = connecting ideas + connecting people

Web 1.0 = search
Web 2.0 = recommendations of friends/others

Web 1.0 = find
Web 2.0 = share

Web 1.0 = techies rule
Web 2.0 = everybody rules

Image: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/75/177926979_9bd2709608.jpg