Archive for February, 2008

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Target: Older people and ICTs

February 27, 2008

Target ImageWe know from the CIBER report (pdf) I referred to in a previous post that many older people are starting to catch up to younger people in terms of ICT competence. But what else can we say about older people’s attitudes to ICTs?

OfCom, the Office of Communications in the UK conducted a study (pdf) (why isn’t there more Aussie research??!!!) in July 2006 on just that topic. Here’s what they found:

  • Age is one of the most significant factors influencing whether or not people engage with ICTs (p. 1); however, attitude and character are key to whether or not people are actually connected to the internet (not health, age or income)
  • Tailoring the learning environment specifically for older people is essential to engaging them in taking up ICTs (p. 4)
  • Those who are not connected will find themselves increasingly excluded (p. 1)

Attitudes could be broken down into four segments, with two user-types (pp. 3-4):

  • Current users: Absorbers (obliged to learn computers at work) and Self-starters (had learnt themselves)
  • Non-user: Rejecters (people who, for diverse reasons, rejected ICT uptake entirely and disengaged (keen to learn, given the right circumstances)

Interestingly, for the most experienced users of tech, there was little emotional involvement; the opposite applied (feelings of wonder, excitement, fear, anxiety) to those who were less experienced (p. 5-6).

What we can certainly take away from the OfCom report is that older people who currently aren’t engaged in ICTs will certainly become so given patience and understanding on the part of those who teach them.

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EdCom: Heart of humanity – teaching philosophy

February 25, 2008

PodulesLogo More from the good people at Blackwood High School in South Australia. In this interview, I talk to Jude Hines, Deputy Principal at Blackwood, about the importance of teaching philosophy to students to help prepare them for citizenship in the broader community. Jude makes a plea to not ignore the heart of humanity, and to teach students compassion, moral thinking, and how to be human through the teaching of philosophy.

The recording wasn’t actually planned – it simply came about in general chit-chat after we’d recorded a conversation about Blackwood’s cultural program, but I asked Jude if we could turn it into an interview and off we went. Apologies for some of the dodgy sound in this recording – Jude was being bugged by a fly for most of it and she was trying to swat it out of the way!

File size: 11.7 MB
Running time: 13.37

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Target: Information behaviour of youngsters

February 18, 2008

Target ImageIn a recent post I pointed to CIBER’s report on Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (pdf) which showed that Net Gen behaviours aren’t necessarily specific to one discrete age group. Nevertheless, the report did present some findings about the search activities of the younger demographic:

  • The fit between search engines and students’ life styles today is ‘almost perfect’ — much better than is the fit for physical or online libraries (p. 7)
  • The speed of young people’s web searching indicates that they spend little time in evaluating information for accuracy, relevance or authority (p. 12). But this also seems to be a pre-Web phenomenon (p. 23)
  • There is little direct evidence that young people’s information literacy is any better or worse than before (p. 12)
  • Young scholars are using tools that require little skill and are satisfied with very basic forms of searching (p. 14)
  • Young people find it difficult to assess relevance when presented with a long string of hits (p. 12)
  • It is likely that young people have good parallel processing skills, but it is unclear whether they are similarly developing the sequential processing abilities required for ordinary reading (p. 18)
  • There is no evidence that young people are expert searchers. Studies pre-Web also reported that young people had difficulty in selecting search terms. (p. 22)
  • There has been an increase in full-phrase searching, but this, too, predates the Web (p. 22)

I think the most important thing we need to take away from this report is the notion that the lack of sophistication and critique that characterises young people’s information searching is not a new phenomenon, brought about by being online: rather, youngsters have always had trouble evaluating and assessing information for relevance — perhaps it’s just that now their information searching behaviour is more public.

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Opinion: Why LMSs are old skool

February 16, 2008

Loudhailer imageIn the early days of the Web, schools and universities realised that teachers needed to have some kind of online presence for their classes. So, we invested in expensive, clunky, ‘uploady-downloady’, Web 1.0 systems such as Blackboard/WebCT and My Classes. The problem is that the world has moved on, and now, thanks to the many free and nimble and frequently updated beta Web 2.0 applications, LMSs have become obsolete. Further, with something like Blackboard/WebCT or My Classes, it is the teacher who has to do everything from setting up discussion categories in forums, to creating ‘blogs’ (what a joke that function is in most LMSs!), to setting up chat.

Even though most classroom management and online assessment can be achieved through free, online blog and wiki software such as Blogger, WordPress, WikiSpaces, WetPaint and PBWiki, schools and universities continue to insist that staff use old-fashioned systems that offer very little (if any) customisation or flexibility when it comes to student learning. And the only reason I can discern for this is that ‘we’ve paid for it so we’d better stick to it.’ This is not an educational argument, it is an economic argument, and a very poor economic argument at that: why would you continue to use something that is out-of-date and doesn’t give you what you need and that actually (in many cases) impedes your work? Why would you drive a coach and six horses when you’ve got a Model T Ford in the shed?

With imagination, creativity and leadership, we can allow academics choice in how they want to set up their courses online. With foresight, consideration and care we can introduce more reticent staff to how easy it is to use free, online software to manage their courses. And with trust, we can allow students to complete their assignments using free stuff, too. We don’t have to ditch BlackBoard or MyClasses and we should certainly be clear about what the institution expects of its community members in terms online presence … but this doesn’t stop us from showing academics, teachers and students the alternatives and then let them use what suits them best.

If that hasn’t got you thinking, then check out Alan Cann’s What the heck is a PLE and why would I want one. More on PLEs (‘Personalised Learning Environments’) and why they are essential to good online student learning in a later post.

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Posted in EduBusiness, Education politics, Learning online, LMSs, Opinion, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Opinion: Calling people names

February 16, 2008

Loudhailer imageThere’s always a lot of controversy whenever you start describing the social and online behaviours that characterise the ‘Net Gen’: Are they critically engaging with what they’re doing? Are they really able to keep a track of all that info that’s coming at them? What about online predators? Are the kids getting enough fresh air? Things get even hairier if you use the term ‘Digital Native’ (for some reason ‘Net Gen’ is less controversial than is ‘Digital Native’): There are lots of people born before the Net Gen who are perfectly at home in cyberspace; not all youngsters are ‘natives’ to this environment, anyway; this is all simplifying things too much.

I don’t have any real qualms over the terms used, as long as we recognise that when we’re using them we’re making generalisations and probably being ever-so-slightly reductionist. There is room for generalisation in anything — that, after all, is how analysis occurs: we interrogate material, look for patterns, and then organise it so that we can eventually create new meaning for ourselves.

But the question is nevertheless raised: How much are we describing behaviours that are peculiar to a specific age group, and how much are we describing the behaviours of anyone who spends a lot of time online? The CIBER team at University College London have gone some way to beginning to answer this question (see my previous post), but the fact remains that for most teachers their new learners will be young people, and, as such, the descriptions still hold good.

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Target: We are all becoming Net Gen

February 16, 2008

Target ImageThe CIBER research team at University College London has just published a report that examines the Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (pdf). The report shows that it is not only youngsters but people from all age groups who exhibit certain behaviours when dealing with information on the internet. Here are some of the things CIBER found to be true across the generations when it comes to online behaviour:

  • Young people are more competent with technology, but older users are catching up fast (p. 18)
  • All of us are exhibiting increasing intolerance for information delay, not just the Net Gen (p. 19)
  • More and more people are ‘power browsing’ through virtual libraries (p. 10; p. 19)
  • Individual, personality and background factors are probably more important than generation when it comes to needing to feel constantly connected to the Web (p. 19)
  • We are increasingly looking for ‘the answer’ rather than a particular format (e.g., monograph, journal) (p. 8 )
  • Scholars are beginning to pre-publish their work through blogs, wikis and personal websites (p. 27)

These findings make perfect sense to me, because I increasingly see in myself and other, older net users many of the characteristics that are said to define Net Geners. What’s not important here is the age of the user but the fact that learners (most of whom will be young people) will be coming to us with certain ways of behaving in the cyber information environment. We need to know what those behaviours are.

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Target: Key processes of ICT literacy

February 11, 2008

Target ImageHere is more from the MCEETYA report on ICT literacy in years 6 and 10 that I referred to in a recent post. Six ‘processes’ of ICT literacy were extracted (pp. 12 – 13):

  1. Accessing information: identification and retrieval
  2. Managing information: organising and storing
  3. Evaluating information: reflecting and making judgements about integrity, relevance, usefulness
  4. Developing new understandings: creating knowledge; synthesing, adapting, applying, designing, inventing, authoring
  5. Communicating with others: exchanging and sharing; creating products to suit the audience and the context
  6. Using ICT appropriately: critical, reflective, strategic decisions about ethics and legals

I like this because it’s not just focusing on being able to use computers and applications, but rather on the whole shebang, including good online citizenship and higher-order thinking.

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Target: ICT Literacy Years 6 and 10

February 11, 2008

Target ImageAnother informative report, this time from MCEETYA, and this time looking at ICT literacy in years 6 and 10.

Importantly, the report makes clear its definition of ICT literacy up front. Some definitions focus on computer skills, others on applications for info processing for communication (p. 3). In the MCEETYA report, ICT literacy is defined as having three ‘strands’ (p. 4):

  1. Working with information
  2. Creating and sharing information
  3. Using ICT responsibly

ICT proficiency is taken to mean a “‘challenging but reasonable’ expectation for typical year 6 and 10 students to have reached by the end of those years of study” (p. xi). 61% of year 10 students reached the proficiency standard, whilst 49% reached the standard for year 6.

These figures might seem low to those who think young people are totally tech-savvy and all tooled up for a digital world, but, significantly, it is in being able to use ICTs to demonstrate the higher levels of thinking that they fall down:

Communication is a frequent use at both Year 6 and Year 10 … . However, there was much less frequent use of applications that involved creating, analysing or transforming information. (p. xiv)

In terms of patterns of ICT Literacy, lower scores were associated with (p. xii):

  • Low socio-economic background
  • Indigeneity
  • Remote locality

Gender didn’t come into it.

The report concluded that simple facility with ICTs does not ensure the development of ICT literacy, and that we should be careful about the assumptions we make about how well young people are engaging intellectually with the virtual world (p. 93). The report calls for building ICT literacy through “systematic teaching rather than incidental use” (p. 93). This means, of course, that many teachers themselves are going to have to work on their ICT literacy, and they, too, need to be supported by PD in the workplace.

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Target: First years’ experiences with technology

February 8, 2008

Target ImageIt’s a bit old now, but given the dearth of research on what the Net Gen is actually doing at university now that they are starting to arrive on our campuses, I thought that this 2006 Uni of Melbourne study would still be of interest to readers.

The sub-title of the study about first year students’ experiences with technology is “Are they really Digital Natives?” I reckon it’s being a bit clever calling it that, because the answer, according to the findings the study presents, would seem to be ‘yes — pretty much’.

Some stats and general comments:

  • 73% of students had broadband access, 93% had unrestricted access to a mobile phone, and 90% to a desktop computer. (p. 3)
  • Computers were most commonly used for e-mailing (94%), creating documents (88%), general information searching (83%). (p. 3)
  • Emerging computer-based technologies were blogs, file-sharing, social networking. (p. 3)
  • International students use a wide-range of technologies and tools more so than local students. (p. 3)
  • Students were overwhelmingly positive about using ICT in their studies, the main activities being using a computer for study purposes (94%), searching for information (93%), general course admin (84%), and SMS (84%) and IM (75%) communication. (p. 3)
  • Engineering, Architecture and Building and Planning students were more likely to use particular technologies and to use them more frequently that were Education and Arts student. (p. 14)
  • Convenience and control are the most valuable reasons cited by students for using ICTs in course — not learning. (p. 15)

On this last point, and as per the JISC report cited in my previous post, it seems that students have trouble figuring out how these technologies might be used in the academic setting to “optimise learning experiences and outcomes” (p. 16). This means that it’s up to teachers 1) to learn how to deploy these technologies in pedagogically sound fashion, and 2) if they are using certain techs in their teaching, to communicate clearly their expectations for learning and assessment.

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Target: Student expectations study

February 8, 2008

Target ImageWho would’ve thought that reading reports could be fun! I’ve been getting stuck into some stuff on Net Gen students and those who are entering university, so I’ll blog the most interesting points from an MP.com point of view.

JISC, in the UK, released its Student expectations study: Findings from preliminary research in September 2007. The study found that

  • “students do come to university with a set of inherent expectations about ICT provision and use” (my emphasis) but that they also expressed a general uncertainty about what universities have to offer. This means that they try “to map their current learning experiences onto this world.”
  • these students have preferences for using technology, see it as core to engaging socially and “regard ubiquitous internet access as the norm.”
  • where it comes to publishing coursework online for public scrutiny, they are cautious.
  • they see technology as part of the bigger picture of learning: it’s not an end in itself and there are other ways of doing things.
  • they believe face-to-face interaction as core to their learning.
  • they often cannot see how “ICT and learning can work together outside the school context.”

This last point is particularly interesting, especially in light of a 2006 University of Melbourne report that found that students’ attitudes to using blogs (and RSS, and web conferencing and social networking software) in their studies were largely ambivalent. (More on this report in my next blog post). Marry this up with the above findings, and I suspect that incoming students simply don’t have enough of an idea of how these things could be used for assessment purposes in their degrees.

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