My final post from this year’s NAIS Annual Conference is about three researchers who spoke on the topic of social media.
We are entering a period when the dominant design of many things is changing radically. For example, for centuries the dominant design of personal timepieces has been something small, usually circular, worn on the wrist. That is no longer the case, as more and more people use their phones for checking the time.
When new technologies become available, they usher in a period of rapid innovation until things settle down into a new dominant design. Before Dodge introduced the enclosed-metal-body automobile, in 1926, there were 75 car manufacturers in America, all innovating. Once the Dodge model became the dominant design, those organizations that could maximize production and efficiency survived. The others could not.
Organizations are designed for production and efficiency, not innovation. Innovation can come from any individual – as teachers our challenge is to encourage creativity. We must be inspired, so that we succeed at raising the aspiration levels of our students.
We are at a tipping point in education where the dominant design is changing. It’s time for innovation!
Technology has an aura, and we are drawn to use it.
We give way too much credit to technology, and not enough to the social forces surrounding it.
“Are you into tech in education?” is a meaningless question. The two cannot be separated.
Remember – “experts” have a terrible track record of predicting the future! (Why isn’t everybody riding a Segway these days?)
If you are feeling overwhelmed by all the change that is happening, consider the generation that lived through 1890 – 1910. Rapid advances in agriculture, medicine, transportation, communication that dwarf our changes.
We need to promote what Ivan Illich called Tools For Conviviality. A perfect example of this is the game Minecraft. Connected Learning is the future (see Mimi Ito’s work.)
There is a new kind of public: networked publics. These are public spaces that are created through technology.
Young people want to be in a public world without being public.
Consider a conversation in a hallway between two people. The default is that the details of that conversation will probably not be shared publicly; it will stay private. Compare that to a conversation online (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Online communication is public by default; you must choose to make it private.
Adolescents get frustrated, because adults don’t understand when Facebook posts and comments are “private” and when they’re not. Adults don’t get who they are “talking to” with online posts. So they have developed strategies for dealing with the 24/7 lack of privacy.
One teenage girl practices whitewalling: deleting at the end of every day all comments from her Facebook wall, and comments she makes on others’ walls.
Since youth cannot control access to the content, they control access to the meaning, in effect hiding in plain sight.
Young people assume they are under surveillance, so they are figuring out ways to circumvent it. For example, posting lyrics to a song that appear to be innocuous, but have meaning to their friends.
Our task as teachers is to help students choose the “right” networked public spaces to be in, and model good citizenship in them.
FracTad's Fractopia 