Technology

Since students are digital, are classrooms too analog?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I just spoke to a parent of a student, frustrated that the standard in a so-called ‘high achievement’ school seems to be dropping. The unspoken question seems to be “why are schools still stuck in the Reading, Writing, “Rithmetic rut?” Or, as some wonder, why are schools not educating the whole child?

A reports earlier this month in TIME magazine, Why it’s time to Replace ‘No Child Left Behind’ is enough to make one agitated!

Many studies say that rut in question, is an obsessive exam mentality that needs an overhaul. School systems have become fixated with preparing children to pass exams, but don’t have the resources to prepare them for the other exam out there –the exam known as Life! Which is exactly what that parent was anxious about.

US policymakers have been alerted to this. A recent Harvard study of student achievement on global perspective (EducationNext.Org) found that unless we fix math and reading skills, the outlook in the global economy looks grim.

Not that this is exclusively an US problem.

Europeans, too are worried. A recent study on how education and training is meeting the needs of the digital world and the European economy (‘The Future of Learning: Preparing For Change’) say that schools need to make a fundamental shift if Europe is to remain competitive.  Students will need to be competent in “problem solving, reflection, creativity, critical thinking, learning to learn, risk-taking, collaboration, entrepreneurship.”

Should we take our curriculum back to the drawing board?  Should we redesign the classroom?

Yes, but... If there are is one thing I am frustrated about, it is the rush to plunk computers in front of students, and think this will solve all our problems. The argument goes like this. Our kids are digital natives, so getting them to take down notes on ruled paper, and listen to a teacher is not the best way to engage them.

I work in digital and analog environments, and have been a big advocate of bridging the gap between these two realms. That does not mean replacing one with the other. A tablet will not automatically make a child collaborative and yearn for deeper knowledge, just as (to paraphrase an old saying) owning a library card will not automatically make a person well read. Preparing students for a 21st century workforce requires us to make them much more than just digital. The European JRC European Commission study calls for education to be more “personalized, collaborative, and informalized.” One could write an entire paper on these three areas.

Sure let’s redesign the classroom, but let’s not discount the importance of a value added teacher who brings extra-curricular knowledge into his/her material. In fact, the term ‘High Value Added Teacher’ is now being used by one Harvard study –see video below.

Also, on a more optimistic note, there’s a great experiment about  ‘Active Learning Classrooms’ worth watching. I like how it is not just the students, but the teacher who is adapting to the new learning classroom as well. Inspiring video!

Will tablets and smart phones kill conversations?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

A few weeks back, I passed a sad tableau of an Asian family: a dad and two sons waiting for Mum outside a Chinese grocery store. All three of them were silently thumbing away on their iPhones. In cars, in waiting rooms, the tablet and the smart phone has become the new baby sitter.

Over the past five years, having reported social media’s many benefits I often have to step back and wonder about what it means to be too much digital.

We have become so used to being ignored while having a conversation with someone with a Blackberry that we sometimes take it for granted.

It’s not just an etiquette problem as some have alerted us to in the past few years. It’s a social problem that will have deeper ramifications –too much ‘media’ perhaps – as we marvel at how connected we are.

It generates caricatures such as this and this.

  • Smart phones don’t automatically make us smarter. (Perfectly captured in that Geico commercial that poses that rhetorical question.)
  • Likewise one more screen in the home won’t make us better informed. While we do see attempts to engage students better using tablets, social media and other digital platforms, parents and educators need to add some caveats. Teaching children media literacy would be a start.

There is a connection between learning to have ‘conversations’ and learning how to learn by deconstructing information presented –a.k.a. discourse analysis. I am planning to connect my Robotics class with a class in Thailand, soon, and have given much thought to the balance of a traditional class with a digital experience where students will talk to each other with and without digital devices. More on this later.

I will leave you with two great pieces :

Enjoy! And do send me your thoughts, comments.

Online Privacy for the rest of us

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

If you didn’t see the blackout yesterday in protest of the Online Privacy Acts going through the House of Representatives and Senate (known by their acronyms SOPA and PIPA) it’s time to pay attention.

It won’t be trampling on the Wikipedias and the Facebooks of this world alone. Google, Reddit, and Craigslist, WordPress, Mozilla, and O’Reilly also protested the acts.

As Shel Holtz rightly noted in a great insightful piece, SOPA threatens much of the content residing on websites of organizations “as long as it resides on a .com, .org or .net domain. All it takes is for a user to upload a video, a photo or a presentation that violates someone’s copyright—even if it’s someone singing a cover of a song at a party—and under SOPA, Internet service providers could be ordered to block the domain name.”

Even those involved in advertising and SEO work.  Even Higher education! Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, according the ReadWrite Web.

I just submitted an article for publication on infographics, so this one caught my eye. It summarizes the issue well. But…. does that mean this blog too could come under scrutiny by the SOPA police?

If you care about having your voice heard, you can sign the petition here.

Updated: The House of Representatives statement on the blackout, says that this was a Wikipedia ‘publicity stunt.’ In a press release (responding to the claim that some organizations had dropped their support of SOPA) it stated that ““Contrary to critics’ claims, SOPA does not censor the Internet.”

“The world has lost an amazing human being.”

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Hard to forget, the first PC I ever owned was the Apple Color Classic*.

But apart from giving many of us in advertising and marketing a simple (as in non-geeky) on-ramp to computing, we remember him for his vision, and his humanity.

I found this statement from him, made in 2005.

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share…

…Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent.”

 

*I have not used a Mac for the past 15 years. 

Hippies or hipsters protesting? Is it the seventies all over again?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

‘Peace through protest’ may sound the flavor of the month, or at least the theme of 2011, considering that peaceful uprisings overturned dictators during the so-called Arab Sprint.

But it reality, this is just the old recipe, delivered to our table on new tableware.

I watched a History Channel documentary on Nixon last night, and just seeing the short powerful segments when they cut away to the anti-Vietnam movement across the country made me realize this. You could cut-and-paste the present protest on Wall Street. Except for the bandanas and peace tattoos of the seventies, the similarities are striking.

People are fed up with their politicians (81 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed; confidence in Congress has dropped). They believe that the best way to send them a message is to show up on the street with hand-painted signs and chants.

OK, so we do have web sites, Twitter hash tags (#occupywallstreet) and Facebook, but it is easy to give too much credit to the mechanical tools of movements.

  • It does help when Salman Rusdie helps out with a tweet.
  • It does help when there is speculation that the Nobel peace prize this year may recognize Arab activists.
The revolution will not be televised.   But just watching the images, and the live stream makes you wonder if the hipsters have taken notes from their predecessors.
But what does this kind of speech, and technique forebode? Watch!

Messing around in class

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Where is the classroom headed?

Having spent the past 20 some years around practitioners of the Montessori method (my wife runs a school) it has been interesting to observe how the ‘revolutionary’ advances in education today borrow heavily from the principles established by Maria Montessori.

So when I approached the topic for a long feature on how progressive educational institutions are planning to better engage students, I had this at the back of my mind. Moves to increase student engagement, and attempts to nudge the ‘sage off the stage,’ and student directed teaching appear to fit well with how Maria Montessori envisioned education. It’s also why some colleges and schools are quietly incorporating social media.

According to a 2010 survey from the Educause Center for Applied Research, 40 percent of undergraduates report updating wikis, and 25 percent use social bookmarking.

The article, titled “Messing around in class”  was published in Communication World magazine. I am truly grateful to three people I interviewed.

You can find a PDF of the article here. http://bit.ly/AFedu1

Dear Eric Schmidt: If I may be so impolite, our track record isn’t great, either.

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Interesting to see the debate ensure, now that Google has stepped into the debate on falling education standards.

Google chairman, Eric Schmidt lectured the Brits saying “If I may be so impolite, your track record isn’t great,” noting that education in Britain was holding back the country’s chances of success in the digital media economy. His abrasive comments were made at the Edinburgh International Television Festival:

“The UK is home of so many media-related inventions. You invented photography. You invented TV. You invented computers in both concept and practice… Yet today, none of the world’s leading exponents in these fields are from the UK.”

Ouch!

But here’s the problem, Mr. Schmidt. While it might be shocking to not teach CS to students at a young age, isn’t it terribly frightening that we’re not doing enough to teach/inspire students how to read? This includes how to spend more time in a library and not in front of screens, how to look deeper and wider about a subject on ‘platforms ‘ that don’t have hyperlinks and cool info-graphics. The problem is not in the UK, but in the US!

This may sound odd coming from me, because I do promote digital literacy, integration social media into knowledge sharing etc. But I work with kids, too. I can see where we are headed. Down the cliff! I have heard people brag about how their Johnny is sooo good at computer games, and loves Angry Birds, but these same parents don’t even own a library card in the home.

It is not just low-income children who can’t/don’t read. After investing some $6 billion in such ambitions programs in the US, the nation that is producing tablets and eReaders, and the coolest reading apps, has essentially flatlined in reading scores.

Time to lecture to the home team, don’t you think, Mr. Schmidt?

Augmented Reality could ‘erase’ instead of overlay

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As I frequently cover Augmented Reality, I am especially enthused how it could be used not just in marketing, but in education and, outside of schools, in knowledge sharing.

The Korean Reunification Project is an inspiring example of how we could stretch the boundaries, literally, of AR. While the technology of adding new layers of content to ‘augment’ the real life experience is marvelous, this one is all about erasing, not adding.

Erasing, as in erasing (‘and heal’) the scars left on a country that was divided.

The project removes the elements that were part of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) “returning it to its natural state before Korea was divided.”

It was developed by new media artist Mark Skwarek, who says his erasAR project is capable of erasing physical objects from the face of the earth!

Let’s send our congressmen to social media boot camp

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Interesting statement by the Ministry of Defense on soldiers using social media:

“We are not here to gag people, because we acknowledge the ubiquity and significant benefits that social media offers to people and the MoD.”

The warning comes at a good time, almost a bit late in the game, now that soldiers have been using a host of social media to stay in touch with their families and even the media. Now that not one, but two congressman have been caught with poor social media discretions, it’s about time for a social media boot camp for government!

Back in 2004, the military began cracking down on personal journals maintained by soldiers serving in Iraq.  Some still blog, but are not sure if they will get into trouble, as this NPR story, reveals.

This April, in the wake of Wikileaks, a Pentagon official, Doug Wilson talked about how “technology — and particularly technology at the intersection of national security — has outpaced the policy.”

My reaction was: Still? You would think thee are more policy wonks than tech people in government.

It’s not just the defense folks who have realized that policy has always been lagging as technology zips ahead. States have been facing the same problem. A national survey of social media in government found that

  • Two-thirds of survey respondents lack enterprise policies addressing social media
  • One-third of the states responding have enterprise policy standards,and are in the process of developing these
Furthermore, “relatively few have developed policies or guidelines to provide an enterprise context for managing social media tool use,” and are “completely balked by uncertainty”
Bottom line, they are seriously lagging in policy.
But the government has also stepped up, with its just released International Strategy for Cyber-security. It states that

“The United States supports an Internet with end-to-end interoperability, which allows people worldwide to connect to knowledge, ideas, and one another through technology that meets their needs.”

All this big picture stuff is well and good. Someone needs to put our elected officials in a room give them a 101 course in using digital channels. Their DIY method of using social media is turning out to be one of DYI –Damaging Yourself Irreparably.

Why the “Unsubscribe” link’s my new best friend

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Are newsletters the face of TMI –too much information?

I must have subscribed to more than I could have handled over the past decade. I’m pretty certain that I was tricked into some of them, too. The odd thing is I love newsletters, and weekly digests. But there comes a time when I just can’t cope with the torrent of the ‘This Just In’ and ‘Today’s Top Stories.’ There’s another problem with e-newsletters. Many have begun to abuse/misuse the opt-in. They often send me duplicates (maybe it’s a glitch), or something that’s a thinly veiled sales pitch.

So over the past week I’ve probably hit the unsubscribe button about two dozen times. For those e-newsletter services that have been slow to purge me from their databases, I’ve happily created a filter to make that happen, and skip my inbox.

Have you had a similar experience, or is it just me? I admit I’ve become ruthless about keeping my inbox to no more than 10 messages deep.

So, to look at it from the opposite end, here’s what this might mean to us communicators. It’s about time we stopped trying to fight clutter with clutter. Let’s start fighting clutter with relevance. This means:

  • Clean up your database. Do some serious database hygiene; purge, segment, and double-checking who’s on our lists. Maybe some people in the database have changed jobs, move laterally, or just use the provided email address for ‘junk’ mail –or when forced to subscribe to something just to get a discount.
  • Stop automating every newsletter to the point that we just fill up the next scheduled one with ‘stuff’ because we don’t like to break the cycle.  (We might be doing our audience a huge favor by giving them a breather!)
  • Write better stories. This is hard because it requires some real storytelling, rather than a lead paragraph, followed by 4 bullet points, snuggling up to a cool stock-photo image.
  • Link to relevance. Point the story and newsletter to something more satisfying than the bland web site. Too many e-newsletter stories that promise ‘more information’ are nothing but traffic drivers. Someone in Corporate wanted to see a spike in page hits, perhaps…
  • Use analytics. Track how many ‘opens’  are engaged audiences. Maybe many of the recipients are stashing your newsletter (and dozens of others)  to be read over the weekend. Which might explain why some never get beyond one click. Maybe that group could become a secondary segment for less frequent mailings, or a different shorter version.

If all your content manager is doing is copying and pasting story leads from other sources, and sending it off to every week, it may be time to kill it.

Or it could be dead on arrival.