It looks like permanent teachers will be provided with laptops, via a multi-year roll-out program. This is really great news. As someone who supports the effective, innovative applications of digital media that compliment and improve teaching and learning in the 21st century, I totally support this. ICTs provide huge opportunities to support teaching, and connecting teachers to resources and each other.
But, this needs to be done properly or it will be a monumental waste of money and result in teachers being even more fearful of technology (a known problem). Warning signs from The Teacher article (linked above):
“(Pandor) realises that … the computer can catapult one over the tedious development route,” says Firoz Patel, the education department’s deputy director general of system planning and monitoring. Yes it can, but that isn’t a predetermined certainty. This kind of thinking is technologically deterministic — it believes that the machine will solve the problems. Eish!
“No face-to-face training is envisaged, but the use of software to assist training is being investigated.” I think this is a bad idea. Face-to-face training is crucial. Just ask Edunova or Khanya.
It is encouraging that between the teacher unions and analysts there is a call for comprehensive training, and monitoring and evaluation. Laptops are a necessary — but on their own — insufficient part of fixing education. Bring them on, train properly, provide content and teacher support (Siyavula is doing this) and they will play their part in the bigger process of fixing education.
Last month I gave a presentation at the National Broadband Forum in Johannesburg, South Africa (SA), on what broadband enablement would mean for education here. The forum aims to collectively produce a strategy for making broadband a priority in SA post the upcoming elections, similar to the recent bb4us campaign in America.
The presentation was blogged about on the South Africa Connect website, as well as covered by ITWeb.
See the forum day’s activities on Flickr and Twitter.
I’ve been working on a short paper on the effects of texting on literacy (forthcoming soon). Texting — SMS-speak, IM-speak, abbreviated and misspelled words, etc. — is much hated by teachers, parents and linguists who complain that textspeak is creeping into formal writing assignments — which it is. There is evidence — formal and anecdotal — of this happening in schools around the world.
My issue with this is the hysteria that has been created — the sense that a generation of youth cannot speak or spell correctly. The hysteria is based on a small number of actual textisms in essays, no more than grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes or the other inevitable mistakes that learners make when they practice writing.
The focus is on the mistake, e.g. the one textism, and not the 499 good words in an essay. The exception/mistake defines the whole piece. In the same way that when you read a book and notice a typo, you remember it. You make a mental black mark against the author and the editing process of the publishers. It’s wrong that these mistakes get made, but they need to be fairly assessed against the bigger picture of the narrative, the story structure, the characterisations, etc.
Let’s not create a whole category for texting and regard it as the death knell of English. Let’s not hysterically focus on the small mistakes. Let’s deal with them as best we can, but ask the bigger question: can young people, especially in SA, write long pieces? According to much research, they can’t because they never practice it. We need to get our kids writing, much longer pieces and more often. The few textisms need to be dealt with, but they don’t mean the end of a communicative generation.
As Aristotle said: “One swallow does not a summer make.”
Last month I had the pleasure of heading up to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to meet Erin Reilly, Research Director at Project New Media Literacies (NML). This is one of six research projects within the Comparative Media Studies program at the university.
The team at Project NML have come up with a list of new media literacies (NMLs) and cultural competencies that young people need to learn, play, work and live in the 21st century. Since I first blogged about the NMLs in 2007, one more has been added:
Visualisation: the ability to interpret and create data representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and identifying trends.
“It’s a dynamic, living list,” says Erin. She explained that many youth today have already learned some of these competencies in social settings, but that it’s important for them to formally develop the competencies in other, constructive settings, e.g. in the classroom. Project NML aims to help create that space — wherever it may be, in school or at after school venues — to give youth and educators the appropriate language to critically think about and practice these competencies. Their work is in direct response to the emerging participatory culture in the world.
Erin Reilly and me at Project New Media Literacies, MIT
One of the issues we spoke about was how to promote the importance of NMLs to educators and parents. While Erin and I get this importance, what about those who don’t, who think a “back to basics” (traditional, non-digital) approach is what is needed in education (as is the case in South Africa)?
Erin explained that we have to present NMLs as a very effective way to develop the basics. We need to demonstrate how to effectively leverage popular culture — which is highly engaging for young people — in the classroom to develop the 3Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic.
She believes that the labels are not important, e.g. NMLs or 21st century skills. What is important are the actual competencies. We need to call these whatever necessary to get the point through. Further, we need to empower educators to create the spaces for their learners to develop and discuss the NMLs. We cannot be the experts who come into the classroom and take over from the teachers. They must be the experts in NMLs. Maggie Verster wrote an excellent blog post about how challenging it is to achieve this in South Africa.
Taking this approach — NMLs as the way to develop the basics — is an effective way to make NMLs part of the curriculum and not an add-on (which drastically reduces it’s uptake by already overworked teachers).
Another key point that Erin raised was how the team at Project NML is increasingly realising that it’s not useful to separate formal education and informal learning. While there are differences between these contexts, the educational dillemas in each are the same, and the learnings in each are easily transferred to the other context.
Finally, Erin demo’d the forthcoming Learning Library, an online play space for learners to practically develop new media literacies.
Hopefully we’ll continue to explore NMLs and work together to see how they play out in the developing world. As I’ve said before, participatory culture is alive and well in the developing world, it just looks different.
For the fortunate learners in South Africa who have access to a computer lab at school, they often only spend 30 minutes per week at these PCs. At the same time, up to 90% of youth have access to a cellphone. The argument of my presentation is that we — educators, researchers, policy makers and parents — need to engage with the full gamut of ICTs and digital media in the lives of young people when we think of their teaching and learning. It is the only plausible response.
Cellphones and (digital) gaming present opportunities — and risks — for learning. It is time to seriously consider the digital lives of young people — to exploit the concomitant opportunities and minimise the risks — so that the growing gap between their in-school and out-of-school experiences is narrowed.
Even in the computer lab, much more needs to be done to fully utilise the affordances of ICTs. Researchers from the University of Cape Town, Mastin Prinsloo and Marion Walton, present a bleak case study of how early literacy is taught at one primary school in Cape Town. They describe their observation of learners and teachers in the school’s computer lab in Situated responses to the digital literacies of electronic communication in marginal school settings (2008):
The teachers enthusiastically supported the use of this [pre-reading] software because it was consistent with their own ideas about how reading as a basic skill should be introduced: as a drill and practice activity.
Children encounter literacy in the context of the authority relations and pedagogical practices that characterize schooling in this setting.
The way they were expected to behave in school contrasts sharply with the potential of ICTs for children’s experimentation, self-instruction and individual choices and creativity
We really need to change this. If that is all we’re going to use powerful PCs for, then we might as well not bother.
At the Web4Dev conference in New York I met with the founders, inventors and creators of some pretty amazing mobile-for-development projects. Below are my top five, with some thoughts on how they could be used for education.
Ushahidi
Ushahidi — which means “testimony” in Swahili — is a free, open-source platform to crowdsource crisis information. It allows anyone to submit information through SMS, email or web form, with each submission pinned to a map. The aggregate effect is a compelling visualisation of an event as it unfolds, told by citizen journalists. It has been used to report on the botched elections in Kenya, the DRC and the war in Gaza.
I told Erik Hersman, the White African behind Ushahidi, that it should be used for an alternate reality game with teenagers in Cape Town.
GeoChat
GeoChat supports relief workers after a major humanitarian crisis, when reliable team-based communication is critical but notoriously difficult to achieve. This open-source group communications technology lets team members interact to maintain shared geospatial awareness of who is doing what where — over any device, on any platform, over any network. According to Robert Kirkpatrick, of InSTEDD, it works like this:
You register with GeoChat either online, by email, or by SMS.
Create a new GeoChat group and invite your team members.
Send messages to one another, or share them with the entire group.
If you’re mobile using your cell phone, prefix a text message with your location — say your current address, or a latitude and longitude from a GPS – and GeoChat will place your icon on the map for online users to see.
Even those not on the ground, e.g. the support team back at UN headquarters, can visualize the remote team on the surface of a map and interact with them. GeoChat is nearing public Beta release.
GeoChat beta test
For educational purposes, this tool could be used by learners when mapping their community. Or for co-ordinating on-the-ground players, and distance players, during that alternate reality game!
Text to Change
In a pilot project in Uganda, Text to Change — an mhealth non-profit organisation — used an SMS-based quiz to raise awareness around HIV/AIDS. The quiz, which reached 15,000 subscribers, had two goals: i) to collect information, and ii) to promote voluntary counseling and testing (VCT). As an incentive to answer questions, free airtime was offered.
The quiz allowed TTC to assess the rate of correct answers within certain socio-economic sectors; this information was passed to UNICEF to inform their interventions. The quiz also resulted in a 40% increase in the number of people who sought VCT. All in all, a very successful project!
Hajo van Beijma and I spoke about how TTC could be used in South Africa (SA) for education. Some ideas:
Literacy development: Send out short stories via SMS, e.g. each chapter of the story is five SMSs. Then ask readers: questions about the chapter (to test comprehension) via simple multiple choice or free-form responses, or ask readers to summarise the chapter and SMS it back, or ask readers to write their responses to the chapter, e.g. what do you think should happen next?
Learner needs assessment: send out quizzes about what subjects/concepts learners are struggling with, e.g. fractions in Mathematics. Provide this data to the Department of Education.
RapidSMS
RapidSMS is an SMS-based open-source monitoring and data collection platform developed by UNICEF’s Innovations and Development team. An SMS submitting quantitative data consists of a keyword followed by parameters, e.g. “User5889 2” could be HIV-patient number 5889 reporting that she’s just taken her second dose of anti-retroviral medicine for the day. Qualitative data can also be submitted — ideal for when polling communities. The RapidSMS interface allows for editing and visualisation of the received data, as well as exporting it for spreadsheets.
As the UNICEF team, Evan Wheeler, Christopher Fabian and Erica Kochi said in their report on Innovation for Africa, “rather than hiring consultants for monthly visits to hundreds of schools to survey teacher attendance, why not visit once and teach children to send UNICEF a SMS on days their teacher is not present?”
Literacy Bridge is a non-profit organisation with the goal of making knowledge accessible to people living in poverty. The bet of Cliff Schmidt — it’s founder — is on audio, and so he created the talking book: a low cost, ruggedised audio player/recorder. The device has awesome features, such as simple device-to-device copying (no PC or network needed), audio hyperlinking (e.g. to a glossary of terms used in the audio piece), and slow play for reading practice.
In Africa, many people have low-access or no-access to ICT. The talking book is perfect for empowering this audience.
The conference made it clear that crowd-sourcing, user participation, SMS and geospatial visualisation (mapping) of information are all red hot right now.
Last week I had the pleasure of lunching at Google in New York. My friend, Bruce Falck, who works there took me on a bit of a tour around the offices. He used to be based at HQ in Mountain View — aka the Googleplex — and showed me around there when I was studying at Stanford.
Alas, one can’t take photos inside, but this is what I can tell you:
It’s huge! Google rents space in the New York Port Authority, which has the largest footprint in Manhattan. The building is a full city block, and if you know how long a block of the Avenues is, you’ll appreciate how long it takes to walk from one end of the floor to the other.
Which is why there are push wheelies to scoot around on. And outside the cafeterias are racks to park the wheelies.
The office space is mostly open plan. But this is no dour cubicle farm. The space is highly customised. Googlers stick up posters of their favourite bands, skateboards or even muppets. One section had a wall covered in about 200 vinyl records. Every desk also has it’s array of personalised paraphernalia.
The engineers (software developers) have Macbooks for portability and PCs on their desks. Often desks are covered in hardware being tested or developed for.
Google runs Goobuntu Linux, a slightly customised version of Ubuntu.
Each meeting room has four screens for video conferencing. I peered into a meeting and the images being beamed from other parts of the world were chrystal clear. Oh, the bandwidth!
The games room is huge, with foosball, ping pong, arcade games, console games (Playstation, Wii, etc.), loungers, etc.
And then there’s the food. An incredible selection of salads, antipasti, roast meets, fish, home-cooking, desserts and drinks. All free, of course.
Google New York (Image: niallkennedy, CC-BY-NC)
When Bruce began working for Google there were 5,000 employees. That number is now around 20,000. It remains one of the most difficult companies to get hired at in the world. As I walked around the building — seeing the giant that is Google at work — I was reminded of a Nokia ad campaign with the tagline “intelligence everywhere.” These are bright people doing very cool, world-changing stuff.
What is impressive is how accommodating the company is: basically you can do what you like with your desk space, wear what you like or make extensive use of the games room. I even noticed a group of Jewish employees praying in one of the meeting rooms. As long as you do your work, and do it well, it’s all good.
The Workshop develops innovative and engaging educational content delivered in a variety of ways — including television, radio, books, magazines, interactive media, and community outreach. Taking advantage of all forms of media and using those that are best suited to delivering a particular curriculum, the Workshop effectively and efficiently reaches millions of children, parents, caregivers, and educators — locally, nationally and globally.
Sesame Workshop has been running for almost 40 years and is the world’s largest single educational provider.
In South Africa, Sesame Street is known as Takalani Sesame. The local production — aimed at ages 3-6 — develops literacy, numeracy and has a special focus on HIV/AIDS safety. Through it’s star character, Kami, the world’s first HIV-positive muppet, the show promotes HIV/AIDS tolerance and destigmatisation. Takalani Sesame has also run campaigns aimed at teenage youth and caregivers.
The TV and radio shows used to include snippets of all official South African languages. But according to Seeta Pai, Sesame Workshop’s director of international research, this was not an ideal approach: “Research showed that children would tune out a language that they didn’t understand, so it became counter-productive.”
Now each TV and radio show is fully recorded in 9 of the 11 official South African languages. The new “applied language approach” is better because, “educationally, it is sound to give children a cognitive and language foundation in their native tongue,” says Seeta.
So, what were we meeting about in New York? Sesame Workshop, and the relatively new Joan Ganz Cooney Center, have always sought to use media for educational purposes. In the 1960’s, the notion of using TV for education was radical. Today, that same radical approach is needed when we consider ICTs such as cellphones, video games and even modernised versions of the bioscope (as used by Sesame Street in Bangladeshi slums) for education.
But what about Africa? At the meeting we spoke about what possibilities the media and ICT landscape in South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania, present for teaching literacy and numeracy. Sesame Workshop would like to conduct an on-the-ground feasibility study of ICT access, as well as survey existing educational interventions and content, to inform its future work in these countries.
Future projects could leverage the full gamut of media, including TV, radio, mobile, CD-ROM and even cheap plug-and-play TV games.
The Shuttleworth Foundation will certainly keep the conversation going as it is in line with our desire to focus more on Foundation Phase literacy and numeracy.
Last week I gave a presentation at the Web4Dev conference in New York about Access to Participation. The point I wanted to make is that while access to information is essential for development (this was the theme of the session I was presenting in), what we should really be aiming for is enabling access to participation. In other words, we need to exploit the emerging participatory culture in society that wants to create and share information, and not only consume it.
At the Web4Dev conference in New York
There is a wealth of information at the “bottom of the [media] pyramid” — the audience that traditionally receives information, but doesn’t get to also share local information laterally or upwards, using media. While community newspapers and radio have enabled a degree of lateral and vertical movement of local information for some years, the increasing prevalence of social media that enables a culture of participation is changing the dynamics of information flow and the power of local voice.
My presentation is online at Slideshare and the video of me giving it is on YouTube (the video is in 3 parts — I start speaking at 1 min 40 sec of part 1). View it to learn more about participatory culture and how it looks in the developing world, under the themes of contribution, involvement, connectedness and conversation, all largely enabled by cellphones.
My work at the Shuttleworth Foundation is about understanding and leveraging the effects of technology and cultural changes for teaching and learning in the 21st century. Outcomes-based education (OBE) is predicated on a constructivist learning approach, where learners make meaning through exploration and creation (project-based learning is common). There is thus an obvious opportunity to link the activities of a participatory culture with a participatory learning curriculum.
Educators and parents are no longer the gatekeepers of information. It
is important for youth to develop the skills — such as the twelve
competencies set out by Project New Media Literacies at MIT — that are
necessary to play, work and live in an information-rich and connected
world. These are the skills necessary to fully participate in society in the 21st century.
Much of what is written about participatory culture in America is very much based on rich multimedia creations: blogs, videos, wikis and photo-audio-video sharing activities. In my presentation I showed that participation in the developing world looks different (but that the desire and benefits to participation are the same).
The dialogue that I would like to begin concerns participatory teaching and learning in South Africa. These are some of the questions that we need to consider:
What does participatory culture amongst youth, e.g. the MXit phenomenon, mean for teaching?
How can educators effectively leverage the activities happening in popular culture contexts to improve teaching? (Notice that I don’t ask Can educators … but rather How can educators …. This is because I firmly believe that it can happen; it simply requires time and effort to explore this space to find the answers. In fact, I believe that exploring this space is crucial to narrowing the disconnect between learners’ lives in and out of school; a disconnect that is making education increasingly seem irrelevant to youth.)
What changes are needed in teaching practices, and in the mindset of teachers, to make teaching more participatory? From changing the layout of the classroom to relinquishing the expert-novice perspective, changes are necessary.
How can social media, such as MXit, be used to give learners a voice? How can that voice, and the literacies developed in the exercising of that voice (visual, information, transmedia, etc.) be evaluated?
How can digital media learner creations and activities be tied to the curriculum? In what way does the curriculum need to be changed to recognise the new media literacies?
What information is in the hands of learners that, if allowed to surface in a participatory way, is useful to educators and other learners? How can this information be gathered, shared, aggregated or filtered? For example, performing a discourse analysis on aggregated MXit chats in the week leading up to exams may provide clues to the issues that learners are grappling with. We may realise that fractions are something that learners just don’t get, and as a result revise those before the maths exam.
Peer-to-peer learning holds much potential to compliment and support an already strained education system. How can participatory culture support peer-learning, using social media?
These are big questions, and by no means the only ones in this dialogue. The sooner we begin to engage with them the better. Through popular culture, participatory culture is happening whether School likes it or not. We urgently need to begin the dialogue around how to best deal with it in a way that supports the goals of Education.
Some blog coverage of my presentation, and the other two presentations in the afternoon’s session track, is at:
I first came across Twitter, the micro-blogging service, in 2006 when I was living in San Francisco. Up until quite recently I resisted using it for the simple reason that I didn’t think I needed to. I was also worried about the concomitant information overload and time consumption that Twitter inevitably brings with it.
But then I read How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense by Clive Thompson, who describes it as a form of “social proprioception”. Proprioception is the way one’s body knows where its limbs are and senses the stimuli from its environment.
“That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects and makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity. Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination,” says Thompson.
He writes about the value of Twitter for keeping in touch with friends, family and colleagues. But of course it’s now used to follow people we don’t know personally but are interested in, like Tim O’Reilly. It’s also valuable for tracking trends and events. It’s a form of “meme proprioception”, allowing us to follow ideas as they are being formed by people who think aloud or sometimes just get an inkling of an idea, relationship or interest that someone is developing.
For example, if someone is tweeting about books they’re reading, people they’re meeting and topics they’re exploring — all along a similar theme — then you can safely assume they will be doing something in that space soon. This is all very valuable, especially when following thought or business leaders to sense what their next big thing might be.
When I attended the Web4Dev conference last week in New York, the Twitter stream provided a way for attendees to comment on presentations, and also include non-attendees, in the back-channel conversation. It’s the first time I’ve experienced this happening and I found it useful, especially when someone was critical of what was being said in a presentation. It was also useful because there were concurrent sessions at the conference so I could have a sense of what was happening in the room next door.
I’m now a Twitterer because I see the value of it. But I do worry that at some point the value it delivers will be less than the time it demands and the information it overloads us with. This is where filtering is needed. For example, I followed O’Reilly for only a few days before unfollowing him simply because I don’t want to know about what he’s having for lunch or who he’s going out to dinner with. That information might be important to someone but not to me. It still takes up my time to read all of the unimportant tweets and time is something that we’re all increasingly short of. So if O’Reilly could let us know which tweets are serious (eg “Just gave a keynote presentation on Web 3.0?) and which are non-serious (eg “Just ate my first-ever boerewors roll”) that’d be sweet tweeting. And if someone works out a filtering mechanism that does just that for us, it would be just as nice.
After all, the power that tweeting gives someone is the same as that of Facebook status updates: it just begs for inconsequential or, worse, self-indulgent “loudspeaking”. The same platform is being used to tell the world that you’ve got indigestion from a greasy lunch or that you’ve just written a valuable paper on how mobile phones can be used in education. Further, the same platform is being used to share with real friends and family as well as followers who aren’t friends or family. There is an obvious problem with this.
So, though Twitter is definitely a good thing, we need more sophisticated filtering and aggregation tools to keep it adding value. Luckily its open application programming interface is already allowing people to do that. I don’t think we’re there yet but I’m hoping it’ll happen soon.
Steven Vosloo 