Individual Field Experience Paper EDUC 404 B06 by: Peter Worthington November 21, 2011

Research Question: Adapt or perish. This elementary principle of life seems to be one of the most difficult things for the education systems across North America to grasp. The fact is, the advent and evolution of the internet has completely changed the way in which most people across the world communicate with each other and social networking is one of the biggest forces at work in this. Web 2.0, the tech-enthusiast jargon term for newer, collaboratively generated digital texts, is a brand new kind of text creation that is quickly able to make reading and writing far more relevant to children coming up in the world. Where readers were previously able to simply allow themselves to passively absorb content, participation is now encouraged to such a degree that it is nearly impossible to remain indifferent on nearly any topic. From comment threads on blogs to community driven games on social networks to putting a video of one's friends on youtube, the drive towards participatory media is now overwhelming. Unfortunately, most of what we can see in schools these days is the equivalent of the system closing its eyes, jamming its fingers into its ears, and humming Camptown Races as loudly as it can. The tragedy is that this is probably one of the biggest opportunities that the educational system has had in ages. There is a revolution in reader engagement in progress and they are sitting out.

Assuming that schools are often resistant to technological advancement either on principle or due to lack of budget, I did not expect to see much in classrooms which was a clear example of social networking in lessons. My research question, as a result of this, was to look into the schools that I visited not just for overt examples of the presence of social networking, but moreover for the presence of web 2.0 principles in the classroom. While it is inevitable that this technology will become a bigger and bigger presence in students' lives, it is up to the schools to sift through this huge wealth of opportunity and discover what works and what doesn't in a class setting. It will need

to be included in some way, what matters is what parts and to what extent. That is, even if the teachers I was observing were unaware that they were making use of the ideas of web 2.0, could I find examples of them anyway? If not, why not? More clearly: How is web 2.0 being applied in the classrooms we observe? Further, is there any evidence of success?

Data Collection: For most of the field experience, web 2.0 exhibited itself in small ways, if at all. Most efforts a school may make towards it are much more heavily filtered and controlled than anything that would actually come out of real online interactions. Schools make use of a proprietary social hub that is referred to as D2L. D2L is a highly moderated and monitored internet setting in which the students are able to produce blogs, send each other messages, and basically do anything that they can do on a mainstream social network. That none of the students actually ever use it was not a surprise to me, but we will save this for the analysis section. I was lucky enough to run into a film/technology teacher who was obviously doing something a little bit different. Her classroom was adorned with posters upon posters for films, bands, and whatever else she could find. While student work was not on display, there were video and photo cameras everywhere for the kids to use and a coffee machine in the back that they also had full access to. Computers were all around and it looked much more like an internet cafe than a classroom. As for the teacher herself, she obviously stood out from the rest of the faculty as fairly progressive. Not the least of which due to her undercut1. She was on a spare period, but the drastically different nature of the class and fact that she taught media-focused classes prompted me to ask her about the use of social technologies in her lessons. As it turns out, she not only maintains a blog that her students are frequently asked to read, but also created a unit on digital citizenship that has since been incorporated into the Career
1 For readers unfamiliar with the term, the left side of her head was shaved while the right side had mid-length hair

and Life Management (CALM) class at the school and has entire sections of her film class taught through a Google+ group that she gets her students to sign up for. Blogging is also a frequent assignment in her classes. This ended up being where most of my data on the effectiveness of social networking in teaching came from. A table of my information gathering follows: Interviews Interview with teachers, including comm-tech, English, and librarians Interviews with students, particularly students who blog Student blog Teacher's blog Tour of D2L system Journal entries youtube videos digital citizenship portfolios My own observation notes Student newspaper

Websites

Student work

Other

Data Analysis and Interpretation: I'll begin by talking about the need to move past scare tactics regarding social networking. The teacher who taught over Google+ was by far the most important and relevant thing I saw relating to actual classroom application of social networking. Her efforts to include it in her school's curriculum were actually quite admirable. From what I could see of her classes, her students became heavily involved in whatever they could. They found the classes incredibly engrossing and were always happy to participate. Her students would come and go at whatever time they wished. In fact, a couple came by while I was interviewing her during her spare period just to grab a cup of coffee from the machine in her room. The atmosphere was definitely one in which the students were happy to come to school, and from the projects that she showed to me they were learning quite a lot as well. She was fantastic at fostering an environment where the kids were not only learning, they were very happy to be doing so. Though the class that she taught the previous

year that was specifically on social networking had not been brought back for this year, she had managed to talk the administration into adding a unit on digital citizenship to the program for the CALM class. This unit, beyond focusing merely on safety (cf. Hobbs, Levinson, Manchester, & Moore, 2009) or bullying (cf. Luce-Kapler, Sumara, & Iftody, 2010), also takes on issues of collaboration, intelligently finding sources for research, and balancing real life with internet concerns. This is a dramatic difference from what much of the literature on web 2.0 in the classroom has been saying to this point as articles we have read to this point have lead us to believe that the main things that educators should be concerned about are safety and privacy. The students seemed far more receptive to it as well, feeling more respected by this broad range of topics to discuss rather than simply being told the internet is dangerous by adults. I would venture so far as to say that these students were not just more informed, but better people for it. Given the way that internet culture is only becoming more prominent in society, this class feels like the sort of thing that should be brought into every CALM program. As it purports itself to be the class that teaches students about the world outside of school, it seems a natural step.

Another important thing taken from this interview was a full breakdown of D2L, after which I became convinced that teacher education on web 2.0 matters is vital to the adaptation to this new technology. D2L stands for Desire 2 Learn and is the school board's attempt to create a social network that it has control over. It is open only to students, parents, and teachers and so sidesteps issues of safety and privacy2 that concern administration. It is also incredibly unwieldy, unpopular among students, and under-utilized by staff. Aside from that, it is perfectly fine as web 2.0 training wheels, so to speak. It functions as it needs to, but the heavily regulated nature of it is very off-putting to all involved. This is unfortunate, as it is also the only place where I witnessed
2 In fact, in order to post an assignment as a blog, classes require permission slips. It is technically considered publishing and so must be regulated.

something which has come to fascinate me. Tucked away behind link after obscure link, there was an option for teachers to share and modify each others' lesson plans. As one of the primary principles of web 2.0 is that of collaborating on the creation of new texts, this is an example of web 2.0 in the classroom that I did not expect to see. That is, entirely between teachers. I was told that this works across the entire school board, so any teacher at any school can work together with any other on the creation of their lessons and assignments. This opens up many opportunities that were not present before the advent of networking of this nature and is something that will no doubt be incredibly useful to those who work with it. For all the talk of remix literacy (Perkel, 2006) and its benefits to students we also need to realize our duty to become proficient at it ourselves. Distressingly, very few that I talked to seemed to even be aware of this option on the network that their own school board provides. Though the resources and capability are all present, the lack of comfort that teachers have with their own system is holding them back from using it to greatly benefit both themselves and their students. In order to take advantage of these things, they need to be taught how to use them and feel capable. We are missing a great opportunity, as it stands.

While the majority of classrooms were fairly traditional, there were several that, despite a lack of technology, managed to at least be applying principles similar to those one would see in a web 2.0 setting. The principles that I am mainly talking about here are things such as collaborative text generation and mixing of media. While some of the activities which develop these skills have been in schools for quite some time, they are the sorts of things that must be encouraged to a much greater degree in order for students to feel capable in the types of online spaces they are emerging into. The final thing of note then, is that web 2.0 can be used in the classroom without actually making use of any kind of computer. In several cases I saw teachers getting students to, for example, comment on each others' entries in their agendas. Much like posting a reply to a person's

blog entry, these children were writing under entries in others' journals and practising doing so constructively. I saw this as incredibly helpful, especially for the young, as they began to get comfortable with the skills that they will be using later in a much less controlled environment. In keeping this wholly analogue however, the teachers avoided encountering the cynicism that the students would often bring to a school controlled network like D2L. I was reminded of the students in Developing Multiliteracies in a Website Project (Spence, 2009) who spent a good deal of time creating their website and maps on paper before transferring them to the internet. While learning about the technologies at work was also important to the children in the article, the skills they gained in the earlier stages were greatly helpful to them and a great learning experience. For those teachers who are not comfortable with the online nature of social networks, this seemed a wonderful way to keep their students involved with the underlying ideas of them.

Implications and Recommendations: During my time in schools, I did not observe as much application of social networking principles as I would have liked, though this was as I expected. What I did see however, only served to make me more sure that it is something that needs to be incorporated into future curricula in order to both increase relevance for students and prepare them for the world they are entering. In order for this to happen though, several things need to be done. Firstly, teachers and administration need to become much more comfortable with the technologies which are relevant to this. Even those teachers I saw who were happy to use them in their personal life were still largely concerned with privacy and safety rather than more general principles of proper use and classroom application. Further, teachers who did go further and teach their students about more than the dangers of the internet were still hamstrung by administration. This is far from good practice, and the only solution to this is to educate staff to the point where they are comfortable guiding their

students through online environments. Literacy is changing to include blogging, video, forums, and other new forms of content. That the students are more confident using them than many of their teachers is something that must be rectified. Related to this is a second recommendation that we stop using scare tactics to teach students about online matters. They are obviously not effective and from what I have witnessed inspire only cynicism.

Further, I would recommend that students be introduced to web 2.0 principles much earlier. As I saw during my time in classrooms, there are many ways to do this that do not require going online and, as such, are much safer for young children. Creating work together and remixing what others have done is becoming more and more important as technology improves and workplaces adapt to it. This must be brought into lesson plans so that students can gain proficiency in these skills early.

On reflection, the question I took into schools is still a vital one. Not so much are the applications of web 2.0 principles successful, as the benefits in what I saw were huge, but to repeatedly be asking ourselves how we apply them in the classroom should be in the back of our minds going forward. Society is changing to the point that we need to be comfortable with these things and skilled in their application. Our students, in many cases, are further along than us in this regard. If nothing else, the benefit of collaborative lesson planning should be reason enough to examine these practices. It is for the benefit of our students as well as ourselves that we must begin to examine how we can bring web 2.0 principles into our schools. References: 1. Hobbs, R., Levinson, M. Manchester, B. & Moore, J. (2009). Internet safety and responsible behavior online: A Threshold Forum. Further details unknown.

Available at: http://mediaeducationlab.com/sites/mediaeducationlab.com/files/Threashold %20Interview%20Summer09Forum.pdf 2. Luce-Kapler, R., Sumara, D. & Iftody, T. (2010). Teaching ethical know-how in new literary spaces. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(7), pp.536-541 3. Perkel, D. (2006). Copy and paste literacy? Literacy practices in the production of a Myspace profile. Further details unknown, available at http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dperkel/media/dperkel_literacymyspace.pdf 4. Spence, L. (2009). Developing multiliteracies in a website project. The Reading Teacher, 62 (7). pp.592-597