When and where should we be teaching students about their digital footprint?

Digital footprints are most likely not the domain of any one course and time.  Given that this is essentially an issue of privacy, it should definitely be stressed to parents that this is something for them to discuss with their children.  However, anyone who is not aware of the ways in which a digital footprint is even made could have trouble with this.  Nevertheless, even in general terms it can be discussed.

Of course a technology class is an obvious place to discuss this issue.  Many students learn to make and post videos in technology classes.  Their videos are all associated with their user names for the video hosting sites, such as on YouTube.

I have a possible answer to the question that Mary B. posted on her blog about this topic: "How do we get students to understand that what they do today will impact tomorrow?"

Given that students themselves might best know how and where to find information online about themselves and others, I could envision a project for use in perhaps a Humanities course where students are asked to play detective and track down information about themselves or a classmate.  We could ask students to take the role of a potential employer who needs to check the character of a student (themselves), as was mentioned in Kim Komando's article "Your online reputation can hurt your job search."  Their findings might give them perspective on what they want to be making part of their digital footprint.

Such a project or similar activity, could also take place in any class during the first week of school as part of a Get-To-Know-You activity.  

The obvious time to approach this topic would be as soon as students begin using the internet.  As the internet is changing so rapidly, digital footprints will probably look different as time passes and technology and applications change.  Repeat visits to the topic would be relevant in each new context.

Finally, teachers could give reminders any time technology is used in the classroom.  Much like classroom management reminders are given before activities with potential for off-task behavior, digital footprint reminders could be given before students log on to their laptops for any work requiring the internet.

Does ISBs AUP take this issue into account?

After skeptically reading deeper in the MS AUP, I did in fact find the following:

Social Networking:

Online safety is a personal responsibility. It is important that students are aware of the implications of their actions online, both to themselves and to others. The actions students take in social networking areas like MySpace, Facebook, or others, can impact their university applications, job searches, and overall reputation. It can also provide sensitive information to online predators. 

Students should keep themselves and the people they know safe by carefully screening who their online “friends” are and what information they share. 

I'd say that's a definite attempt to address the digital footprint issue.  Now it's just a matter of disseminating this information to staff, students and parents.

Post Final-Project Course Reflection

Many experiences I had while working on my final course project with Jono serve as great examples of the value this course has had.

First while planning this project, Jono and I realized that a jigsaw project involving student photo movies needed a platform for the students to put all their pieces together. Last semester, I would have asked students to put their pieces into a common folder on our school server and then assembled them myself or perhaps asked one or two students to be the final assemblers. A few days ago, Jono and I hunted for and discovered an online video editor where students could upload video clips and combine them into a final movie. This is essentially like a wiki for movies. Now the students can be part of their collaboration until the completion of the final product.

Next, in the short time between when Jono and I published our project sketches on our blogs, we received feedback from a Technology-Based Project expert from the US. Obviously, such feedback was only accessible to us once we made our sketches publicly available. Last semester, we would have had to rely on each other for ideas and a first experience to see what improvements we could make.

Finally, while simplifying the text that we were asking the students to work with, we both began working on the same computer. One of us read the original text, we discussed modifications, and the other typed. We thought we could save time by each modifying half of the text and then putting our two halves together. We set to work on our individual computers. But the breakthrough for us came when we realized we could share a text document through Google Docs and work simultaneously on the document. Now we didn't need to look over each other's shoulder if we had a question; we could both see it on the screen. We jointly finished simplifying the text and can now both access it for final edits. No multiple versions. No emailing files. All convenient and efficient.

In short, today's experience captures some of my learnings from this course. Collaboration is getting easier and easier for students and teachers alike given the developments in technology. Technology also gives us access to remote feedback from others who we don't even have to know.

During this course, I had a few experiences where I realized that some of the collaborative applications could save real time and paper. For example, using a spreadsheet in Google Docs for students to share data made it easy for them to see each other's work and draw conclusions from a larger set of data than just their own.

To me, this course has been as much about exploiting technology for my own professional practice as for collaboration for the students. Hopefully, I can continue these new practices now that the course is finished.

Horizon Report

Reading the NMC's Horizon Report was the first report of its kind that I had seen. Something that surprised me was that the time frame given for many of the trends were stated to be in the future, although if asked, I would have said these some of these trends were already here: cell phones, cloud computing, geotags, etc.

One thing that was interesting was the prediction that by the year 2020, most people will use their cell phones to connect to the internet. This development would be an interesting twist to the concern that computer technology is accentuating the gap between the haves and have-nots in the world. While it maybe true that access to the internet via personal computers may be limited to the wealthy, internet access via cell phone might not be. It appears that cell phones are much more accessible financially than personal computers, and as with everything, as the price comes down, cell phones that act as personal computers might eventually end up in the hands of less wealthly people who currently do not have access to actual computers. This all means that the internet and all the connectivity that goes along with it might become part of more and more people's lives.

As for the cloud and the idea that computers will no longer be the physical repositories for computing power, storage space, applications, etc, I experienced this at a company in the US where work could be done from home with a remote access client. The client logged into a work station or network of computers in a company building, and allowed me to use the computer network to run the applications that I ran at work. Essentially, all the activity was happening on the workstation at the office, but the graphic interface was being broadcast over the internet onto my screen. What I could do was a function of the power of the computer I was logged into. If the internet connection was fast, I could see everything at home as it came up on the workstation I was logged into. It's essentially what Remote Assistance is on the Windows platform. Perhaps the difference between now and the future is that this style of computing will pervade all applications and tasks.

While I will be interested now to follow the development of these technologies and the future horizon reports, I'm more interested in seeing the Horizon Report for K-12 education, whenever it is finally released.

Project Sketch

In 6th grade Science, the students study cells through various activities, one of which is a 4 page reading from their resource book. In EAP Math/Science, Jono and I preview and review content with an emphasis on our ELL's language development.

We are thinking about doing a jigsaw-collaborative-technology project to tackle the 4 page reading, which will likely be extremely challenging for the students. Instead of having them each read the assignment, we would like to involve them in making a photo movie as a vehicle for the reading.

More specifically, we can divide the reading among 12 students and 2 teachers, and each work on our part. For their parts, students slowly read their parts and use whatever resources they need to make sense of them (internet, dictionary, classmates, teachers). Perhaps we will rewrite the text to make it a little simpler for them, or provide them with a text with explanatory annotations.

Anyway, their first task will be to use flickr or Google Images to find images that help explain the various sentences in their part of the text. They will then use Windows Movie Maker or PhotoStory to record the text, assemble the images, and maybe write out the text on each photo.

After they have created a multi-image movie for their part of the reading, the students will use JayCut (an online video editing tool) to collaboratively assemble a class video of the entire reading. They will be able to insert their section and save it for classmates to edit, i.e. insert their parts.

After the video is published, the students will watch it as a class. Ideally, the graphic images as well as seeing and hearing the text will help the students understand the content as well as appreciate their group effort using technology. We could even post the movie to YouTube with a tag which identifies as the reading from the particular resource book for other students around the world to view.

A question I still have is if there is a way to make the first part of the assignment something that students could do as partners so that there is student-student interaction rather than just individual student-text-web interaction.

I believe this project meets the NET standard below:

2. Communication and Collaboration
Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.

Students:
a. interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of digital environments and media.
b. communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats.

New things in new ways?

While reading Prensky's Adopt and Adapt article, I understood and followed his model of technology adoption. It made sense that dabbling was followed by doing old things in old ways, which was followed by doing old things in new ways. How many times have I thought that using computers for tasks that could been done by hand, such as illustrating or designing, often made something prettier but required more time--a perfect example of an old thing in a new way. Anyway, I read on.

In the final stage of adoption, I found these two sentences of doing new things in new ways:

"For the digital age, we need new curricula, new organization, new architecture, new teaching, new student assessments, new parental connections, new administration procedures, and many other elements."

Motivational, yes, but not very informational. Just what specifically is Prensky advocating for? I read on and found this:

"If we really offered our children some great future-oriented content (such as, for example, that they could learn about nanotechnology, bioethics, genetic medicine, and neuroscience in neat interactive ways from real experts), and they could develop their skills in programming, knowledge filtering, using their connectivity, and maximizing their hardware, and that they could do so with cutting-edge, powerful, miniaturized, customizable, and one-to-one technology, I bet they would complete the "standard" curriculum in half the time it now takes, with high test scores all around."

Is this what he means by new things in new ways? Make the knowledge more future oriented and make skills more technology based? At first glance, that doesn't strike me as a new thing in a new way. Aren't there places in education already that address these topics? Aren't there courses already that teach programming skills? Does shifting the curriculum to these areas constitute the "invention" of which he speaks? Is this the "experimentation" in lesson plans, classes, etc of which he speaks?

I feel just as in-the-dark about the New-things-in-new-ways stage of technology adoption as it applies to education as I did at the beginning of the article. What should technology integration look like?

Peer Based Learning (From Dig.Youth.Proj. Conclusions/Implications)

What teacher wouldn't want to the respect from a student normally given to an experienced peer rather than the "respect" students give to their authority-figure school teachers? I can't imagine that many people would argue against peer-based learning given the benefits that it has. There will probably be more discussion about how it can be used effectively in schools. Here's some quick thoughts on that.

If the report found that the experienced-peer adults who formed part of the interest-driven online groups were themselves avid hobbyists and creators, then teachers might benefit from sharing the work they do within their subject so that students could see this hobby/creative element in their teachers. Students perspective might change if they saw their teachers doing the work that teachers asked students to do. A book I'm currently reading on writing instruction suggests that students benefit by seeing their teachers write. Can this perspective be extended to all subject areas?

Unfortunately, the analogy between the report's peer-based learning groups and school breaks down becaus school mostly lacks the interest-driven element that interest-driven groups have. For the analogy to be complete, we would have to learn to interest students to the point that they see school subjects as something worth devoting their interest to. That seems like an enormous challenge given the prescriptive nature of our school curricula, but it is nonetheless an implication of the findings of peer-based learning in interest-driven groups.

Another option would be to let students study what they are interested in--an individualized curriculum. This is likely to be unmanageable in a school setting where learning is typically measured and reported in an standardized way. It would also be beyond the means of the teachers to be experienced peers in every field the students chose to study. This doesn't have to be a problem as long as schools can find some way to measure student's learning. Perhaps, students could be given the non-content-specific learning goals we have for them and asked to explain how they were met in their investigations.

Or, in an effort to steer learning towards peer-based learning in the absence of student-interest we can allow for students to work together. Of course, there we run the risk of students not actually learning, but letting their partners do the learning for them. This would work best in the case of two motivated students. I don't believe this attempt to promote peer-based learning would be as ideal as either of the first two.

Geeking Out. . .Can we learn through hobbies?

The section of the MacArthur report on Geeking Out reminded me of the fact that hobbies have been the source of some of my most personally rewarding learning. When I was young, it was making plastic model airplanes or model rockets. In college, it was salsa dancing and psychology/mythology. Once I got a job, it was finances and economics. Most of the time, I shared my hobbies with only one or two other individuals at a time, but in college I was able to share my passion in salsa dancing with an entire club. I don't think anybody would doubt that we were salsa geeks. We explored, learned, and taught each other. We gave each other feedback. We felt a sense of pride when others copied our "moves" or picked something up we had shown or explained to them. The same applied to salsa music and sharing it with the other dancers. We even shared with each other which peer-to-peer file-sharing networks (which were just taking off about 10 years ago) to use to find music online. In short, I closely identify with the experiences on geeking out which were described in the report, such as video making or rap music in MySpace.

Again, I don't find the experiences to be new to humans, but I expect and appreciate that the authors of the study are attempting to validate the geeking out that occurs online nowadays. Is it hard for me to appreciate that many people need for technology to even be validated because our school embraces technology? Am I lucky to have (been) immigrated to Digi-land at a young enough age to appreciate what natives are doing with technology? Regardless of the reason, I appreciate that technology, online special knowledge networks and online interest-based communities and organizations can provide a fantastic opportunity for learning, just as non-virtual hobbies and interest groups have too.