Are you a parent who wants to learn a lot more? Social networking professor, researcher, and all around guru, danah boyd (she prefers no caps), delivered this lecture at the Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts in 2009. Her presentation gives a terrific overview of the social networking world and offers a bit of a window that enables parents to peek into the digital souls of today's children and young adults.
If you are a parent, teacher, or other adult working with children this blog aims to help you learn lots more about helping digital kids grow into thoughtful, collaborative, and savvy digital citizens. The blog's mission is to help adults understand more about the digital world, 21st century learning, and the virtual environment that children take for granted.
Rheingold’s vision of a person’s personal trust network copied from the video.
Teaching children to evaluate resources and determine credibility is the biggest challenge of our 21st Century world. Until now authoritative textbooks have dominated the world of education, but not anymore.
In the video below, Howard Rheingold, the digital thinker, professor (Stanford and UC Berkeley), and personal learning network advocate, describes how parents and educators should help students develop the ability to ask questions when they discover digital information, thereby evaluating the quality or lack of it. Rheingold calls this “crap detection,” a term originally coined by Ernest Hemmingway.
We need to teach kids, Rheingold points out, “how to search and how to find” and how to be sure that what is found is of good quality. The long-range goal is for each individual to develop what Rheingold calls a “personal trust network.”
One of my sunflower pictures with words added for a presentation on professional development.
I have a new favorite app — Wordfoto. Interestingly it’s designed for an iPhone, but does not yet have an iPad version.
With the Wordfoto application I make a word list and then have some fun designing art. I select a picture as a background to highlight my words. I can use an image that comes with the app, I can use one of the pictures in my iPhone photo galleries, or I can take a new picture.
When I combine the picture and the word list — voila, a cool Wordfoto. The app comes with a variety of editing options, allowing users to play with the image, crop it, create styles, and fine tune the texture of the pictures. Wordfoto also comes with preset styles that introduce texture, color, and depth variations, making it easy for new users to get started.
Newly created images can be easily e-mailed, posted to Facebook, and more. Once e-mailed, the Wordfoto jpg images can be incorporated into other projects.
Potential uses? Spelling lists, messages and cards, vocabulary practice, event signs, and much more. The images will also be useful as illustrations for school reports, and I’m excited because I design occasional images for my blog posts.
Over the past 10 days I have attended multiple, jam-packed professional development events. I’m beginning to think of it in reality show lingo as my extreme professional development experience, because I’ve encountered so many colleagues along with ideas, hands-on strategies, learning theories, and thoughtful approaches, all focused on becoming better teachers, collaborators, and learners in the 21st Century. One over-arching idea applies to all of my activities: learning, unlearning, and relearning are now routine. Anyone not comfortable with these three concepts — connected and in tandem — needs to get acquainted with them ASAP.
I’m reminded of a quote from futurist Alvin Toffler, “The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, and relearn.“
My extreme adventure started about 10 days ago when I presented in the Virginia Shenandoah Valley at the Virginia Association of Press Women. I described how technology has transformed the way we all learn and how specific content is now less important than our skill at discovering information, evaluating it, and using it well. The digital content is out there for everyone to find, I told the group. The role of adults and teachers is to ensure that as we teach one area of content we also ensure that children are developing the skills to recognize, evaluate, and use quality information.
I drove home on Saturday and left again on Sunday for the annual AIMS Technology Retreat on the Maryland Eastern Shore.
A year ago I asked my fifth-graders to write podcast scripts. They wrote about teasing, cyberbullying, gossip, intention vs. consequence, advertising, digital footprints, and the lack of facial cues in electronic communication. Working mostly in collaborative groups, my students recorded complete “’casts” in our informal laptop studio.
As always when it comes to 21st Century learning, a few students improved upon my lesson plan and asked to write podcasts for their other teachers. The resulting efforts helped students refine their digital citizenship perspectives. One student noted, “When an electronic problem [like cyberbullying] becomes a ‘big problem,’ teachers talk about it at school. How come we don’t talk about these things when they aren’t [big] problems?”
Jessica Matthews, a co-creator of the energy-producing soccer ball, SOccket, visited my school today, taking the place by storm with her stories and engaging presentation.
A collaborative, 21st Century learning team working together for an undergraduate college class project, envisioned a soccer ball that might create clean energy as it moved around, while still being a ball for playing soccer. Their SOccket invention is astonishing and inspiring, creating enough energy to plug-in a lamp or charge a mobile phone. Now, several years later, two members of the team have become social entrepreneurs, and SOccket is in production.
This CBS This Morning report gives lots more background. Two of the students, Jessica and her former classmate Julia Silverman, formed a start-up company, UnCharted Play and the your can watch company’s introductory video, with an intro by Bill Clinton.
Are you thinking about starting a blog for school, work, or family? It a terrific communication opportunity.
At SomeNovelIdeas, a blog authored by librarian Stacy Nockowitz, would be bloggers will find a comprehensivelist of links to help them get started. She organizes her links into following categories:
Blogging Basics
Blogging Resources
Blogs About Blogging
Blogs to Follow
Blogging Platforms
Images
Also included at the bottom of the resource page is a glossary of blogging terms.
Last year I taught a short blogging course to parents at my school. My Start a Family Blog class, hosted on a WordPress blog for two months, is still available.
It’s a privilege for me to write occasional posts for the Teaching Tolerance blog. However, years before I ever wrote a word for the Tolerance website, I used it as a reference and information source to develop my teaching skills and expand my understanding of the world.
You should too.
If you don’t know about Teaching Tolerance, an arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, or if you don’t visit the website on a regular basis, you are missing an ever-expanding information universe focused on human rights, diversity, anti-racism, community-building, acceptance, tolerance, inclusion, and much more. In the digital age, with information and misinformation moving at lightning speed, we cannot learn too much about these topics.
In her presentation Professor Turkle illustrates several of the most compelling issues from her recent book, Alone Together. Shepoints out that technology may give us an illusion of togetherness with others, but she challenges us to understand that digital connectedness is not a substitute for person-to-person interaction.
Are we hiding from each other even as we are connected?
With fewer face-to-face conversations with one another are we less able to learn how to have conversations with ourselves?
Do feelings that no one is really listening to us make us want to spend more time with machines that make us feel like these devices are listening to us?
Are people increasingly willing to settle for the pretend empathy of devices and robots?
Libraries have always been amazing places, but today, look no further than a college, university, or public library to observe an institution that has figured out how to support access to information and 21st Century learning. Libraries are especially adept at encouraging patrons to collaborate.
I am sitting in the James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. Officially I am here to search through the archives on the fourth floor, learning more about Virginia’s Massive Resistance era, but now it’s lunchtime and I am taking a break, walking around, and exploring a bit.
Libraries are very different from the time when I went to college or even a 10 years ago when I took my last graduate course. Today every library that I visit is collaborative — welcoming interaction among patrons, connecting information from everywhere, and inviting people inside, even first time visitors like me.
If we are not willing to collaborate today, we are not learning especially well.
