So, the kind of censorship we've been hearing about most this past few weeks has been of the Iranian type. However, while it may be fashionable to carry your green Twitter avatar in support of free speech halfway around the world, we are all too quick to forget that on our own doorsteps public sector internet service providers regularly block free speech and tools that make this possible with their firewall policies. It's not any cleaner or more reasonable than Iran blocking Facebook or Twitter for their purposes, serving only to control what the public hear about their public services.
Join The Guardian's global challenge to crowdsource internet censorship of all sorts right now, and show how much of Britain's and North America's public sector ISPs are just as unreasonably restrictive of adults' web rights as Mr Ahmadinejad's Government.
Pic: Censorship
When social networks were still finding their feet among their key demographic a few years ago, I was a keen advocate of formal learning institutions and their staff keeping out of those spaces, certainly not using them as social learning environments. danah's research backed this up and the concept of teachers creating "creepy treehouses" was enough to knock that desire of some on the head.
Seeing how the US Army has harnessed Facebook for a mix of both informal communication and leadership is opening up the question again in my mind, as the demographic using Facebook rises well into the 30s and Twitter's growth started with an older demographic and is only now appearing to edge southwards to early 20 year olds and teens (thanks to my wholly unscientific research - danah, if you're not busy this summer...).
It's particularly pertinent as Local Authorities charged with improving the prospects of their learners and staff in an increasingly technological age do not cease to become ever more Machiavellian in their desire to clamp down on any communication about the realities of being a teacher or learner in their patches.
On the Facebook blog this morning says Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Arata (link to his FB page):
From an institution that in 2000 wouldn't allow unfettered access to email (and before that whose "Full Metal Jacket" reputation preceded it), one of the most traditional public institutions with the most apparently valid potential for killing communication to those back home has come a long way. And it also shows how far schools and teen learners working within them have to go before their life cycles start matching the real world.
What is it that Facebook brings the military? It allows family to keep in touch with minimal effort through a great deal of the deep ambient intimacy of the status update:
Facebook is also giving a platform for sharing of skills and advice between recruits:
It also allows senior members of staff in the military to, quickly and easily, without disrupting the flow of their day, update via cellphone or laptop on what (non-secret) operations they are undertaking. What exactly does an army Colonel do? Well, now you can 'follow' them and find out. It will almost certainly make a few more people aspire to doing something different or improving their act not just in seeing what superiors and, above all, seeing what peers are up to.
While intranets and VLEs provide a structured learning environment for teacher-defined groups of learners, they do not provide very well (or at all) for friends-of-a-friend (FOAF) communication, happenstance connections and temporary windows in on what FOAFs are up to. They are designed for preset activity with preset groups, despite the admirable efforts of talented creative individuals to shoehorn them into other more enticing uses. It's hard to argue that, in terms of how kids connect within the school environment with school-like material and contacts, things have really moved on since the likes of my students blogging and podcasting from their French trip in 2003 (the 2004, 2005 and Auschwitz blog remain). The fun serendipitous connections are happening very much outside the school boundaries, and the school institution itself remains largely blind to this. The knock-on effect is that school and what it should stand for - learning - are also blind to learners outside the schooling complex.
Now, at Channel 4 the Education department has worked with great skill over the past two years to create learning opportunities in the social networks and spaces where young people hang out (think Battlefront, YearDot, Routes.... There has been little attempt to make these interactions fit into schooling per se. At 4iP, where many of our products and services involve learning of some description, we continue this 'non-school' of thought.
I wonder: is there mileage for schools in looking at what the Army is achieving here and for what purposes, and seeing if there are unmet needs in the schooling environment which could be supported by social networking services and platforms which are increasingly better embedded in society? Or is this something in which only others outside the formal schooling environment are prepared to invest?
Pic: Full Metal Jacket
edinburghmsc: via @jar: University of Edinburgh e-learning systems developer post available in the College of MVM http://bit.ly/15QAV6
In about two months I'll be unveiling my latest commission with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public Fund.
Broadcast reports that we are commissioning Dan and Adrian Hon’s Six to Start to develop a creative writing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, backed by national education agency Learning and Teaching Scotland. The game, currently under development, aims to help users tap deep into their imaginations and develop their creative writing skills by responding to writer challenges through their iPhone. They say we all have a novel in us, and ‘All Write’ will help users find it.
Six to Start is a highly successful developer specialising in digital storytelling with recent notable successes such as the We Tell Stories series for Penguin Books. Learning and Teaching Scotland have over the past three years developed a world-leading reputation for developing gaming for learning. The partnership will lead to both a mainstream game available in the iPhone App Store, and a teens' version for use in schools.
This is how Adrian puts it:
Alderman was also a lead writer on the Hons' previous success, alternate reality game Perplex City.
All Write is the latest in a series of projects developed in Scotland by Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public fund (4iP). Announced as part of the Channel’s Next on 4 strategic blueprint and endorsed by the Government’s Digital Britain Report, 4iP is a major new initiative to encourage innovation on digital platforms.
By helping young people and new audiences to discover the joy of reading and creative writing, All Write illustrates how digital media can serve a meaningful public purpose.
My former colleague Derek Robertson, now National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning at Learning and Teaching Scotland, was quoted:
All Write will be launched worldwide this August on the iPhone App Store. Pic credit: New iPhone
I'm in the process of contracting, planning and soft-launching a beautiful web arts platform in my work with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public along with the talented guys at ISO, which will provide a really meaningful and inspiring space, we hope, to learn about and publish one's own art, digital media and films. More on that soon, although you can catch a sneaky peak at our session, The Digital Express, in the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
It means that my eye is increasingly heightened on all things design and artistic, and this has just distracted me, Morgane and Catriona for most of the latter's tea-time. It's one reason to let your two-year-old onto that MacBook Air touchpad. Go on. You know you want to.
edinburghmsc: via @jimwolffman: How Harvard is innovating in digital education: http://www.edlabs.harvard.edu/
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: reminder: HEA grants for students. deadline June 18th 2009 9am. http://escalate.ac.uk/grants/type?ID=3
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: can the IDGBL students fill in this survey when they have a second please? https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/idgbl0809
Seth Godin doesn't just 'do' marketing but he teaches it regularly, too. His latest rant is on the insidious growth of the business of textbook writing and publishing, as a result, he believes, of laziness in the market and cynical money-grabbing by a select few from an ignorant system.
The argument is certainly not that books are inherently wrong in a schooling environment (Seth has sold his share of millions of books). Books such as those I read offer insights from leaders in their fields, normally insights which are relatively up-to-date (give or take 12 months) and which would be a nightmare to try and consume on a 500 pixel-wide blog posting.
But textbooks, written as they are, out-of-date, error-ridden by mistype or time passing, curations of general knowledge rather than journeys through learning with personal insights, almost always are the professor's/teacher's lazy option. Says Seth:
The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.
This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.
Seth's assumption is the same as mine, and the underlying pretext of the eduBuzz platform: that teachers are paid to share their knowledge, not just with those students in front of them but with anyone in their learning communities, and sharing with this community will make us all better teachers and learners.
Arnie's got the right end of the wrong stick: it's not a question of changing the media through which the textbook is published, it's about changing the very notion of the textbook.
By far the easiest way to do this is to blog regularly, in bite-sized, timely learning chunks that can be read, commented upon, linked to and adapted by students, their parents and your peers. It is much harder for everyone to publish this in a textbook, ends up much more inaccurate and, above all, is less accessible due to cost than an internet connection in every home.
Sharing, and sharing online specifically, is not in addition to the work of being an educator. It is the work.
