Electronic Classroom Etiquette

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article commenting on how professors feel challenged by the distractions which laptops, cell phones, and other mobile devices afford students in their classrooms. As described in the article, many students are making poor choices...surfing the web during lectures, IM-ing or emailing off-topic, and generally not taking advantage of classroom dialog. The author makes a good point that we need to create a better ethos of responsibility around the classroom use of mobile technology or "e-etiquette."

I teach every day in classrooms where my students have laptops and I understand this concern. Students need to be taught what is okay and what is inappropriate. They also need to learn to take advantage of class discussion to hone their communication and critical thinking skills. These skills will produce agile flexible learners -- one of the dictums of the 21st century skills report. However, I don't think that removing the technology is the answer; I think teachers need to learn management strategies to skillfully make use of technology which supports and enriches classroom dialog and resources.

Being able to seamlessly integrate virtual classroom tools broadens the opportunity for participation and extends the discussion beyond the time and place of the classroom walls. A simple strategy is to teach your students what "half-mast" means: the laptop screens must instantly be put half-way down so they cannot be seen (for purposes of discussion), but leave the computer on for instant transition back to an electronic activity that supports the learning context, such as taking notes, researching a website, back-channel chat rooms, posting on a discussion board, or collaborating online.

When I was a student I took all of my notes for every class using a tablet. It gave me an unprecedented level of organization. At my fingertips I had every note, every email, every resource that I'd ever explored. When the teacher mentioned a name or topic I was unfamiliar with, I could google it and was able to contribute more to the class discussion because of this. When the teacher presented a topic I had their powerpoint slides in front of me to annotate. I could switch to a concept-mapping program to brainstorm and organize ideas that were being presented. I could pull up Excel to calculate my grades. Using Windows Journal or OneNote I scrawl my notes, doodles, and diagrams that help me absorb what the teacher is saying. I draw diagrams at meetings of who is sitting where to help me remember names/faces, and who had made what contributions. I can't imagine not trying to give students this same tool. It is so powerful. They just need to be taught how to use it appropriately for their own benefit.

Putting the Printing Press in Perspective

This is an incredible time! It seems like every day brings news of some new tool or an easier way to do something that extends our ability to communicate, interact, and publish online. Today on the wizards list-serv someone mentioned Stickam, a website that creates an easy way for anyone to include a live stream from their webcam onto the Stickam site or onto any other webpage. This new tool certainly adds to the challenges that schools face in teaching kids what is appropriate, safe, and for that matter, useful.

This revolution of communication tools is allowing anyone with an internet connection to publish in any medium, and allows people to network and connect in new ways [text, audio, video, synchronous, asynchronous, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many]. Content is subscribable, taggable, and popular content bubbles to the surface of user-created folksonomies. It makes the revolution which the printing press wrought seem almost mundane... and we're only on the cusp of this change. This is an incredible time. For my own little publishing contribution this week in this brave new world of online presence, I just put up a home movie [Windows Media Player required] of our new dog, Gilmore, from our trip to Hilton Head. He wasn't quite sure how to pick up a frisbee that lands face down :)

This new publishing phenomenon also raises sticky issues about intellectual property and copyright -- my video uses clips from three songs as background music. Since they are each only a short portion of the song, I felt okay about including them. I came across an interesting rule about copyright of music for online radio last week (can't remember the source), but as I understood it, it said that providing music online is acceptable so long as the user cannot control the stopping or starting of the songs, or save them. I guess this is how the internet radio station Pandora is able to operate. Speaking of Pandora, and new ways of connecting-- it's a customized radio station: you tell it what types of music you like and then it sends you a stream of music based on your taste.

So all this new media leaves me wondering if we even realize the impact it is having and will have on our society. Working within a school it certainly seems imperative to address it and deal with some of the thornier issues with our students. Unfortunately, as many ed-tech gurus have noted, our students are getting very little exposure inside school, and almost all of it, on their own at home. We do lecture them about the dangers of giving out personal information on the internet, but meanwhile, they may be streaming their lives to a new network of like-minded computer-connected users flung far and wide. In some ways it feels like the train has left the station and we're still sitting in a coach & buggy wondering what that loud noise was.

Wiki Replaces Personal Document Storage

I was interviewed on the webcasted EdTechTalk show last month about the used of wikis in education. The show's hosts, Alex and Arvind, are great guys and it was fun to participate in this new form of media which feels a lot like radio on demand. The guys' demeanor remind me of Click and Clack on CarTalk [I hope they take this as the high compliment it is intended as]. At any rate, we had a nice chat and explored a few wikis, but I forgot to mention one area of wiki use which is most intriguing...

In my everyday work I am finding that I am much more interested and motivated to save my informational documents onto a wiki page as opposed to into my personal computer's "My Documents" folder. I'm very involved in the SchoolComputing wiki and also an eLearning wiki which my Hopkins' class created. I'm now finding that when I want to save a document during my normal day's work, I want to put it on the wiki, not in my personal files. The reasons are multiple... Most importantly I hope others will improve and add to my documents. Beyond that, having it on the wiki means I can get to it from anywhere, I'm hopefully contributing to others' knowledge, I can find it again easily using the "Search" function on the wiki, and I can link among documents easily. As examples, I recently collated some ideas that flowed in from a list-serv I'm on about the use of DyKnow software. Rather than saving this collation of ideas as a Word file, I put it on the wiki here. I am also working to adapt my faculty technology competencies document into Alex's page here. I find it fascinating that the wikis are replacing my "My Documents" file storage system. It's changing my understanding of document storage, intellecual property, and collaboration. It's a huge paradigm shift.