Emerging Technologies Consulting

I’ve been working on a couple of presentations for the last few days.  The underlying theme of both of them is that people still fear the Internet.  My discussion of this theme with my husband led to some heated arguments.  He thinks that people, especially educators, don’t fear the Internet any more.  He claims they’re willing to use it for research and recognize that their students will too.  That may, in fact, be somewhat true.  I’m still skeptical that it is.  When it comes to social media, however, fear seems to still be the prevailing emotion.  People tout the idea that “stuff you put on the Internet is forever, and you should be very, very careful.”  I don’t disagree, but no one’s giving the other side, that putting good information about yourself online can lead to good things.  And yet, people still seem to think that there’s some kind of bogey man lurking behind the screen who’s going to get you.  If that’s true in higher education, it’s especially true in the K-12 environment.  Dean Shareski writes about participating in a panel on social networking at a local high school that left him feeling very disappointed.  While it’s important to educate students about online privacy and safety (though like Dean, I think very few kids are in any serious danger online), it’s equally important to talk to them about the positive side of social networking and social media.  I’m starting to see kids in college who’ve had this fear message pounded into their heads and in some ways, they’re shooting themselves in the foot.  Employers can’t find anything on them, good or bad, and so they get lost in the crowd.   Being required to use social media, like blogs, in a positive way, as part of their curriculum can benefit students much more than fear mongering can.  Take this comment from a student in my class:

I’ve been surprised at how useful just having some of my writing up on the internet can be. When I was applying for an internship that would involve writing for a blog (many of them do, now, it seems to me), I included a hyperlink for this blog in my cover letter in order to give the interviewer easy access to some writing samples, and it kicked off the conversation in the interview. A friend in this class said this blog came up in her interview, too. So I definitely agree that blogging can help us out in the future–and the future is now, I guess!

The future is now, for sure.  Social networking is not going to go away.  It may morph and change, but making it seem like the destruction of civilization as we know it doesn’t help our kids learn how to use it responsibly.  If they avoid it out of fear, they may miss out on important job and life opportunities.  Is that what we want?

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• Social media threats hyped by science reporting, not science – via @arstechnica (arstechnica.com)

Via Chris Dawson, I read this Guardian article about the revamping of British primary education to include 21st century communication skills, such as using Twitter and Wikipedia.  Chris’s post includes a quite funny cartoon about the revamped curriculum.  It’s well worth stopping by just for that, as well as Chris’s analysis of the proposed curriculum changes.

I’m all for teaching “21st century skills,” whatever those are.  But I shy away from teaching specific tools.  I think the thing to do is to figure out what the underlying concepts and skills are and teach those with whatever tool makes sense.  Ten years from now, we might not be teaching about using Twitter, but we probably will be teaching about how to find and evaluate information via the Internet in a variety of ways.  One might use Twitter and Wikis and IM to teach collaboration and communication skills.  How do you communicate with your colleague about a project when they’re far away?  Or we might think about fun ways to teach content using these tools.  One criticism of the curriculum is that it’s sacrificing the teaching of certain historical periods.  How could you use blogs, wikis, and podcasts to teach that content instead of teaching blogs, wikis, and podcasts in and of themselves?  For one thing, it’s easier to learn these tools when there’s a specific application for using them and for another, the content might stick better if students are creating their own materials based on the content.  As Chris says, it’s quite possible that this is exactly the way schools will implement these tools, within a good context, but it’s hard to tell from the article.  And that leaves the curriculum open to criticism from folks who feel like things are getting constantly dumbed down.  I’d argue that it’s actually more challenging intellectually to create a podcast about a WWII battle (imagine having to created a fake newscast from the front) than it is to just read about it and listen to a lecture on the facts.  This doesn’t have to be a dumbing down if it’s done well–and therein lies the real challenge.