Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category

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IT and ICT: same difference?

May 11, 2010

No, it’s not, and I think it’s about time these two things were separated out more clearly because the difference is neither subtle nor inconsequential, despite that fact that many people believe the two to be essentially the same thing.

The key is in the word ‘communication’ (as if that weren’t already a clue) and to ignore it is to demonstrate that you’ve missed the point about Web 2.0 entirely.

In this day and age, IT (Information Technology) should really be only used to describe the ‘inner’ workings of digital technologies – i.e., stuff that relates to Computer Science, hard coding, software development, hardware development, scripting, and all that. ICT (Information Communication Technology), on the other hand, should be used to refer to the social aspects of digital life, to Web 2.0, and to anything that funnels the flow of communications between people.

Thus, “I am an IT specialist” should be taken to mean “I have a functional knowledge of how the web works and I can write source code and run servers and do other awfully clever, technical things.” Whereas “I am an ICT guru” should mean, “I know how to find, evaluate, and effectively exploit for social ends the tools that other people have built.” Quite a different thing, really.

People tend to use the terms interchangeably, but that single word, ‘communication,’ makes all the difference because there’s quite a distinct skill set involved in successfully engaging with either. Just because you can write javascript doesn’t mean you know how to make the most of participatory culture.

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The three tiers of digital literacy

May 7, 2010

I find that a lot of people get confused over what it means to be ‘digitally literate’. Many older users interpret younger people’s facility or confidence in using ICT as an indication that the latter know exactly what they’re doing in the online environment. After all, they’re pretty zippy in there, right? And gosh-darn aren’t they clever ‘cos they can program a VCR? (I can’t even begin to tell you what’s wrong with this notion.)

Of course, watching a 13 year-old flitt around MySpace can be intimidating for someone who doesn’t know where to click, but that doesn’t mean that the 13 year-old fully understands all they need to in order to be digitally literate. So, let’s break this down a bit. I’d offer three main strands to digital literacy in the current era:

  1. Functional digital literacy. In the age of Web 2.0, that doesn’t mean knowing how to hard code, or how to program, or how to write javascript — I don’t need to know what’s under the bonnet in order to drive the car. Instead, it means knowing how to sign up for a service and what happens after that; it means knowing how to find and add and invite friends; it means knowing how to upload a profile photo, etc., etc. Many kids have this kind of literacy, no doubt — the facility with the technology to know where to click.
  2. Network digital literacy. Understanding what it means to be a networked citizen. That means knowing how to manage your profiles and identities online; knowing what happens to the material you upload; knowing about data management and understanding boyd’s four properties of networked publics, i.e., 1) persistence, 2) searchability, 3) replicability, and 4) invisible audiences. It also means risk management and knowing how to read and interpret Terms of Service and Privacy policies. Do most people (young or old) know what it means when Facebook asks for a “transferable, sub-licensable” license to their IP? No.
  3. Critical digital literacy. This is perhaps the most crucial of the three, especially if we’re talking about how to use ICT to further cognition and to advance what Pierre Lévy refers to as collective intelligence. Critical digital literacy is about how to find, validate, interpret, communicate, analyse, critique, evaluate, synthesise, transform information and how to then use those skills in the participatory realm. It’s about higher-level thinking and engagement with cultural, social, political and intellectual life. In other words, it’s the big stuff.

What I’m saying is, don’t freak out when you think you’re being left behind because the kids are oh-so-clevva and teched up. Chances are you’ve already got the higher-order, intellectual skills you need to become a fully-rounded digital citizen. This in itself means that your network literacy should come along very quickly. And as for your functional literacy, well, just jump in there and play around a bit — you can’t break it ;)

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‘Doubt’ movie trailer remix by meg

October 4, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the movie ‘Doubt,’ starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffmann. The IMDB summary for the film reads,

“Set in 1964, Doubt centers on a nun who confronts a priest after suspecting him of abusing a black student. He denies the charges, and much of the play’s quick-fire dialogue tackles themes of religion, morality, and authority.”

Great film, a proper morality play. What I also loved about it was the way it commented on new technologies and the changing times. So I thought I’d do a remix along the lines of a movie trailer, as seems to be all the rage (check out Scary Mary Poppins … it’s a cack!). Here’s the radio edit … I made a dance mix too, but I prefer the shorter version, myself :) . Hope you like it. I think it’s kinda fun!

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Posted in Digital literacy, Education politics, Opinion, Technology | 3 Comments »

Opinion: The merit of study

October 23, 2008

This morning, I attended (and briefly presented at) the start of the Australian National University’s ‘Festival of Teaching.’ The focus of the two-day gathering is explained in the program’s descriptive title: “Linking research and teaching to benefit student learning.”

OK, so the language is typical of inelegant edubabble everywhere, but, that aside, I want to take issue with how the trendy focus on ‘research-led teaching’ and ‘research-based learning’ (the latter of which includes the equally graceless terms ‘inquiry-based learning,’ ‘case-based learning,’ and ‘problem-based learning’) shifts our attention away from the merit of study. Plain, old-fashioned, sit-on-your-backside-and-attend-to-a-topic … study.

Of course, I understand why there’s all this hoo-ha about ‘research-led teaching’ — it’s no doubt a reaction to so-called ‘transmission teaching’ or the ‘banking concept’ of teaching, as Freire would have it. And I certainly understand and commend the pedagogical worth of using research (on this meaning, the collection, collation, interpretation and presentation of data) as a basis for teaching in the university setting. But I fear that, just as in the past we surely over-valued the ‘sit-down, shut up, and learn’ philosophy of education, we may now begin to over-value the role of student ‘research’ in university learning at the undergraduate level.*

For there is a lot to be said for apprehending study on its own terms and not just as a part of a broader research process. I know that, for myself, I cherish the few moments I get in my week to sit down and apply my mind to the close examination of a subject. Quiet study — study for its own sake, meaning for the sake of intellectual cultivation and enrichment — allows room for contemplation and consideration, reflection and reverie. In other words, study is more than an ancilliary of research. We need to slow down the train hurtling down the research-teaching and -learning track and gain a correct balance in our intelligent endeavours.

In my previous post, I called for a properly holistic appreciation of knowing. Here, I would like to suggest that we embrace a similarly holistic approach to the educational enterprise as it is undertaken within the Academy.

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*Notice my deft qualification there? ;)

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Opinion: Remembering and other forms of knowing

October 23, 2008

One thing that strikes me as I teach people about moving around the web is how much we privilege remembering over other forms of knowing.

This has gotten me thinking about types of knowledge and how and why we value them, and how they link to remembering as a form of knowing. So, I’ve done a short analysis of what I think is going on as a way of explaining why this privileging might occur.

Let’s start with three common forms of knowledge — declarative, procedural and conditional — and take them apart a bit.

Here’s a basic representation:

Declarative Procedural Conditional
Knowledge about What How Why
Cognitive form
 Memory Remembering Understanding
Products Facts, information, descriptions, principles Actions,* skills, performance, know-how, things, doing Thought, thinking, consideration,
evaluation, innovation
Process Contextual Concrete, observable Abstract
What is evaluated
 Recollection Circumstance Concepts

In my observation and experience, most Aussies rank ‘knowing how’ at the top of a hierarchy of knowing. This isn’t really surprising, as ‘knowing how’ to do stuff is of great value to us: we see ourselves as practical people, as people who can fix things, as people who are problem-solvers with a can-do attitude. And ‘knowing how‘ to do stuff means all those things I’ve pulled out in the above table: remembering steps, using skills to complete a task, and producing a measurable, observable performance that evaluates circumstances.

A further, more general, explanation could also be that procedural knowledge is perceived by most people as the most imperative and useful for web purposes: “I just need to know how to make it work, before I gather too much information about what it is and the principles that underlie its function, and before I think about why I might want to use it.”

‘Knowing how’ to do stuff is thus seen as a right and good thing, and therefore something that is assigned a price above that given to the declarative and conditional ways of knowing.

But it is the cognitive form of remembering that is of interest to me in this post, because when people ask me about their web travails, “How do I do X?” and I respond, “I don’t remember … I know that you can do it, though, just let me have a quick look,” I’m often challenging their assumptions about the primacy of procedural knowledge. And giving a declarative answer to a procedural question makes many people uncomfortable because, as I’m arguing here, the ‘doing’ of a thing is valued more highly than is either understanding why you might do it, or having facts about it in the first place.

It’s also surely the case that ‘doing stuff’ tends to yield more tangible and measurable products (which are relatively easy to evaluate) than does thinking about stuff or identifying principles (which are harder to evaluate). Which is not to say that ‘knowing how’ is unimportant or irrelevant in. But it is to say that an approach to knowledge that privileges one form of knowing over others prevents us from bringing together all the ways of knowing into an attitude that could, quite frankly, help us learn quicker and more deeply, no matter the context.

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*Here I’m thinking of ‘actions’ along the lines of Aristotle’s praxis.

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Opinion: Who’s making what money?

September 26, 2008

Many teachers want to know how cool, free, online software services such as (Wetpaint, WordPress, Wikispaces, Netvibes, SlideShare, Clipmarks, whatever) make their money. ‘Contextual advertising’ is normally the answer.

But before we get that leg swung too far over the moral high horse, consider this: the company supplying the Learning Management System (LMS) that your institution uses is also likely to be making a nice quid — except that in this context, many LMS companies are making money explicitly out of education, rather than out of advertising.

Some LMSs, such as Moodle and Sakai, are free and open-source (and we approve of that ;) ), but others (Black$Board, Web$CT, My$Classes) are asking budget-bedevilled schools, unis, etc., to fork over for what is, in fact, some pretty poor product. Some of these wretched companies have even used money earned from education to sue smaller competitors!

So, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because something is supplied by your institution that it automatically holds the moral high ground over the free stuff. There’s more to it than that.

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Opinion: Rethink your ideas about tech support

September 25, 2008

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One not-so-minor assignment I’ve set myself at present is to change teachers’ thinking about tech support. Just a small thing, then.

It’s true that in the past — with clunky, difficult Web 1.0 technologies — we’ve had to rely on techies to do some proper hard-core stuff for us, such as fixing bugs in software or resetting webpages that we’ve managed to bugger up, or dealing with server issues. But now, with the much more stable and reliable technologies of Web 2.0, we no longer need someone hanging off the end of a phone, dealing with the numerous problems we’ve created for ourselves.

The reason is that Web 2.0′s software-as-service (i.e., online applications such as wikis, blogs and social networks) is pretty much bulletproof: you can’t break this stuff as you could break stuff in the old days of Web One. Which in turn means we have much less need of a help desk staffed by a real-live human person, just in case.

The point is this: once you are in the world of Web 2.0, you have to shift the model of support that you’ve got in your head. Help in WebTwoLand comes in the form of googling solutions for yourself, checking out FAQs, and trawling the web to find the geek who has already solved your problem for you and kindly posted a solution in a discussion forum.

Forget phoning the help desk. Forget The Manual. Forget, even, pressing F1 (always a trepidatious proposition to start with!). Instead, search YouTube and find a video tutorial or visit a how-to site (there’s plenty of them out there). You can help yourself in this environment simply by thinking differently about tech support and how you get it.

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Opinion: It IS about the technology

September 24, 2008

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You hear it all the time at education seminars, conferences and keynotes: “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the people.” Well, excuse me, but what a platitude — and how easy to get eduweb sceptics and the generally afeared on side when you tell them what they want to hear! Having said that, however, I am being a bit provocative in my title for this post …

Of course it’s about the people, but what’s often missing from the trite, unreflective maxim referred to above is the fact that people are technology, technology is people. We cannot be homo sapiens without technology.

Our mistake is to think of technology as only shiny, whizzy things that go bang. After all, a pencil is a technology. Writing itself is a technology. Indeed, a rock can be a technology, depending on the use to which it is put (I’m thinking ‘stone axe,’ here).

But to let the ‘It’s All About the People’ people off the hook, let’s acknowledge that they’re onto something, because what they’re pointing to is the need to focus more on the people than on the technology itself, if only because people are rather more inscrutable and intractable and difficult to handle than is the technology. This might seem counter-intuitive to some, but, when you think about it, it’s easier to figure out how to change the display order of a wiki page than it is to change the way a person thinks about, understands, and engages with their own relationship to technology. So, let’s work with the people, and acknowledge their apprehensions and help them make sense of how the technology works, but let’s also not lose sight of one of the things that makes us human to begin with.

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Posted in Digital literacy, Opinion, Technology | 2 Comments »

Opinion: Barriers to teaching online

July 9, 2008

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Me mates at education.au have released a report on Educators and ICT usage and one of the most interesting things it points to are the barriers that educators report to thier teaching and learning with online technology (p. 33). Here are the main hindrances they’ve identified, plus my reasons for why all of these, excepting the final barrier, should not be barriers at all:

  • 41%: Poor infrastructure, bandwidth, equipment reliablity, accessiblity of logins, permissions. Discounting the bandwith issue, the ‘poor infrastructure’ barrier can be largely blamed on unwieldy and user-unfriendly Learning Management Systems (BlackBoard, MyClasses, WebCT …) that school and some university administrations insist teachers use. Logins, permissions, reliablity, blah blah blah, aren’t an issue with most online applications that can be turned to an educational use.
  • 40%: Blocking/filtering of internet content. See above, with an especial emphasis on ‘administration’ — namely, the reluctance and/or unimaginativeness on the part of ‘admin’ to come up with policies and guidelines that manage risk.
  • 21%: Limited access to computers or internet connection. Will Ruddy’s digital education revolution sort this one out? There’s no excuse for its not doing so.
  • 20%: Limited confidence or expertise in the use of compter technologies. See above and above and above. Teachers need PD in this stuff and it needs to be paid for, but, really, the main reason they’re spooked is that they’ve only ever had experience with dead-awful LMSs and they subsequently don’t know how easy the Web could be if only they were allowed to use it.
  • 12%: Lack of relevant resources on on the internet. You could say that there’s not much you can do about this one … except why not create such resources yourself? :)

What a dire set of results! But as a South Aussie, and as someone who passionately believes in the value education, not firewalls, I’m pleased to say that South Australian educators were most likely to name blocking of internet content as a barrier to teaching and learning online, at a respectable 67%.

Come on, education leaders! Start being a bit creative and pro-active on these issues! Decide where your priorities need to be with online teaching and learning and develop policies to manage risk. Employ people who know this stuff from an educational point of view and who can teach the teachers and who can defreakify things for them. Get yourself educated on online technologies and their use in education. Students, parents and teachers are relying on you to be across the issues and to start finding solutions that will work in the ‘real world’ of the Web.

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Opinion: Why kids don’t tell us about cyberbullying

July 9, 2008

Loudhailer imageYoung people have probably always been reluctant to tell their parents or teachers that they’re being bullied, and it’s no different with cyberbullying. But one of the most telling reasons that kids are giving these days for not reporting cyberbullying is that young people don’t think parents and teachers understand the types of social networking or other web/mobile services they use (see the Digizen report on young people and social networking services, pdf, 1.2 MB, p. 16).

And in many cases, they’d be right. Frequently, I find that the non-Net Generation people I know and speak to have little idea about how young people socialise on the Net, let alone how online social software actually works from a user’s point of view. Parents and teachers often feel intimidated by the amount and variety of stuff that’s out there in cyberspace, but that’s no excuse for not getting properly informed about the Web and mobile-based services that their kids are into, especially when the health of our young people is at risk.

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