What worries me about this

What worries me about this is security and privacy for the child.

From http://www.macworld.com/article/59488/2007/08/facebook.html
"Users of the Facebook social-networking site are too gullible in giving up personal information, which could make them the targets of identity theft, according to Sophos research."

As a parent I would want to know what steps the school has taken to ensure my child would be safe using this "tool"

They need time and $!

What they are lacking is the kind of adaptability that can only be gained by nurturing energetic and curious educators such as Kennedy, Kovak and McConville and by giving them the trust and freedom to carry out their visions.

What they are also lacking is serious release time to build their courses. As a lot of distributed learning (DL) schools are quickly realizing, building engaging curriculum (in both blended and and purely online schools) is very time-consuming and expensive. Unfortunately, we work in a province where the government has built a decentralized, hyper-competitive model for DL [even though Ministry types will have the gall to preach cooperation]. Therefore, we have a lot of DL schools competing for students, but with few resources other than the same old correspondence school curricula (from OpenSchool, etc.). Quality must, in this model, always take a back seat to numbers and completion rates.

The Gods Must be Crazy (by giving us Facebook)

Don Tapscott and Chris Kennedy seem to be playing a parallel role to the Bushman in ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’, discovering a new technology and trying to put it to use in one’s existing suite of social practices. The focus on ‘the new tool’ and ‘how to exploit it, is not where we should be looking. We should be looking at the transformation of relationships that is induced by the use of the tool. As Marshall McLuhan noted;

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. --- Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’

Who says it’s a good thing to have kids using Facebook, a networking facilitiation tool? Or are we supposed to just ‘accept’ that ‘this is the way the world is’ and not only not give guidance, but encourage the use of whatever crops up and becomes popular? Vancouver psychologist Gordon Neufeld (‘Hold on to your kids’) suggests that ‘peer attachment’, which leads to bullying, is a growing social problem. The growth of homeschooling has been influenced by this pragmatism in the public school system of giving the kids whatever they as a group decide they want. Is this what we want?

Hindsight and Foresight

Hi Nick, good essay here, thanks.

Basically, I think online learning has come a long way since the 90s and then again it hasn't, especially wrt schooling. When I ran Virtual High in Vancouver in the 90s we had a vision of innovation and empowering kids with tech and opportunities for learning that supported them achieving their self-declared learning goals. It was awesome and the learning greatly exceeded anything i had experienced as a conventional classroom teacher. (BTW VH was not especially virtual but an aging Shaughnessy mansion that we rented - however we did bring in the first Ministry developed online courses of any school program in the Lower Mainland by several years and we encouraged all our kids to use Mac laptops, as we adults used them). Well, we attracted endorsements worldwide but not from the Ministry, the VSB or the BCTF - none of whom would even come for even a visit in our 4 years of existence. Actually they went out of their to stifle us and eventually we had to shut down because the (NDP) government of the day said there was nothing in the School Act about the Internet therefore we couldn't be supported! End of VH.

In many respects this lock-down controlling attitude still prevails throughout the land, though some obvious exceptions are arising, as you describe in this article. But check in with most SDs and innovating, and especially giving kids access to tech tools - and modeling its appropriate use by teachers - is as foreign as eating chocolate covered ants. And it is resisted. I just attended and presented at a Tech-ed conference in Kamloops 3 weeks ago and at times I thought I was in time warp, listening to people talk about the use (and non-use) of technology wrt supporting learning as if they were planning next Friday's school dance.

This discourages me. As an innovative educator I am convinced and confident that the suite of learning technologies available today can definitely help to surpass the mind-numbing regime that continues to define conventional schooling for many many kids. Isn't that what we as educators and parents want for our kids? I know it's what I want for my daughter, now attending a local high school where she has a total of one teacher using one inet application to send her assignments online. This is simply untenable to me. Is it any wonder kids rush home from school and plug in to FB or 2nd life or ... an increasing field of psychically-engaging techn-spheres? Not to me it isn't. I'd be doing the same if I went to school at all.

And BTW, We are going global with our SelfDesign program starting this coming week!

Cheers, and keep up the good work!

- Michael Maser; Director, SelfDesign Learning Community

And around, and around...

“…mind-numbing regime that continues to define conventional schooling for many many kids. Isn't that what we as educators and parents want for our kids? I know it's what I want for my daughter, now attending a local high school where she has a total of one teacher using one inet application to send her assignments online. This is simply untenable to me. Is it any wonder kids rush home from school and plug in to FB or 2nd life or ... an increasing field of psychically-engaging techn-spheres?”

Eine grausame salbe, indeed. I would respectfully suggest that this goes around the central subject of the mind-numbing stuff in our schools and elsewhere, which has nothing to do with the level and sophistication of gadgetry. You can get mind-numbed in front of a top-of-the-line box, and you can soar with a wood-and-graphite pencil in your hand.

What is important is that when a child is ready to learn something, someone must be there to make that learning available. That’s why it takes a village, instead of a pair of harried parents, who are whipping around town to get the bread together, and a teacher who has thirty others, some of them wounded warriors, to take care of.

All we need to do is NOT STAND IN THE WAY of the child’s natural need for and pace of learning. We are born social beings, who want in from the word go, and who want a share in the goods others seem to have. Motivation my foot. We have it in spades as a gift from the Gods. We can make up all kinds of excuses for how we screw that up, before and after they hit school, but the beginning of solving a problem is recognising we have it, and we just go on talking around it.

Tech for the sake of Tech

Sometimes those in the educational profession use technology for the sake of using technology. The blended class is a great idea, but discourse through online means can never replace face to face interaction.

Learning to use non-verbal communication and reading body language is still part going to school and interacting with people. Something Facebook cannot provide.

Owell, I am sure that someone with 273 Facebook friends will tell me I am wrong.

However, let the students lead the way with technology.... and not the marketers who want them social networking all the time - and looking at advertisements.

The medium cannot be the message

When you work in a school system that has managed to take all the innovative educators and stifle their creativity over and over again then the message is loud and clear.

How many districts have a politico in charge of the district technology who has no qualifications whatsoever? Sadly this is true in far too many schools. The dinosaurs rule and the students have to seek other ways to evolve.

author response

Thanks for the insightful comments and the informed questions.

The first issue I'd like to address is that teachers are not using Facebook to teach their classes. The online component of a blended class takes place within a password protected learning management system. No one outside of the class can see what students post.

Although Alex Kovak did tell me that he does use Facebook to announce volunteer opportunities to students, because they check it more often than email, what Kovak and I mostly spoke about was how students are comfortable with using the tools, without really understanding what they are and how they affect who we are.

If Kovak was to have a role in The Gods Must Be Crazy, he would be the one holding up the coke bottle and having everyone talk about what this thing is, and how it will change the way that everyone relates to one another.

I agree that students can have some great learning experiences with just a paper and pencil, or just on a walk outside the classroom, if the teacher is skilled. The point I try to make in the article, however, is that a good teacher will know the strengths and limitations of each tool, and use them accordingly.

Online discussions are never meant to replace classroom discussions, to address one reader's point. Online discussions are composed, consisting of what we call "academic conversation." Each posting is brief, and can be hyperlinked to give an argument support. Classroom discussions are spontaneous and improvised, calling into play a whole other set of skills. Often, students with a lot to offer will never speak in class, but will thrive in an online environment.

Yes, there are teachers who use gadgets because they are novel and might attract students attention. This article is not about them. Blended learning is about using the best tool for the task at hand.

Type Tech Hype

It is not that I am denying the value of Facebook, I am suggesting that its value to the classroom is overrated.

Just because many students spend more time watching television rather than reading books does not mean that we should replace lessons with videos from exceptional instructors “because students are comfortable” with television as an information medium.

Facebook is for “social networking”. As an adult, do you want you employer viewing the social aspects of your life? This is why most of us use pseudonyms on this website. As a student would you want your educators gaining too much insight into your life?

I am not suggesting that education, socialization, and entertainment are not the same. They are in many respects. But the internet has a sort of shallow permanence to it. Would you want the expressed views that you held when you were 16 posted on the net indefinitely? This is the danger of online discussions.

You do mention that Kovak uses Facebook rather than email because “students check it more”. Does Kovak really think that many of these students who are not checking their email are really going to give priority to a message from their teacher?

I have spoken to teachers who have used an open source program called Moodle. I notice that this program is not mentioned anywhere in this article. It is free educational software – and most importantly free from advertisements. However, it is also boring and tricky to use at first. But then again, a lot of useful things are boring and tricky to use at first.

But it is constructivist in nature, and Moodle, or a program very similar to it, is going to continue to level the global educational playing field. Just being born in Canada and having good access to learning materials is not going to necessarily cut it any more. It is giving students choice and expanding their boundaries that will keep us near the lead.

Let students guide the use of technology and define their generation, but why use technology for the sake of using technology? Educators should give them access to the best tools, guide them a bit with experience and goal setting, but then get out of the way.

For Mr. Smith

“…students can have some great learning experiences with just a paper and pencil, or just on a walk outside…”

OK, I was objecting to the consumerist views I seemed to see expressed in another poster’s input, and this answer does indeed look like more of the same.

Education, the part of it that takes place in schools, does its job when it is presented as a progressive, holistic enterprise, where each step builds on those previously mastered. It does creep me out when I hear any part of this scenario termed as ‘having an experience’. This jargon seems to refer to a limited, packaged, unconnected ‘thing’ which is buyable and sellable, as in education being another commodity in the marketplace.

I believe we need to make far more radical changes than just putting new gadgets or ‘tools’ into the existing setting. I believe it is the setting itself there is a problem with. I believe we are cutting heels and clipping toes all over the place on our children in order to make them fit, so we don’t have to react to them or deal with them as individuals. We are busy cataloguing, categorising, diagnosing and ‘tooling’ them into standard issue. One of my children who did graduate from High school, put it neatly that what she and her classmates went through had not been education, but rather processing.

I have seen both my own children and numerous friends of theirs be desperately motivated to learn at several points during their schooling, and just as often as not, those intents stranded on the kids and their needs somehow not being perfectly in sync with the bureaucratic framework. This would in any other setting be seen as an outright failure of the system. The worst example I can think of is a bright kid, who finished the first grade Math work-book in his Kindergarten year, and then was presented with the same book to do over again in grade one. A system so ineffective as to not know where this kid and each of his classmates were on the scale, going into next grade, particularly at this early crucial point, cannot accomplish anything remotely similar to real education, but remains an insensitive machine, a processor. It speaks to the kid’s desire to co-operate, that he was halfway through the year before his plight was mentioned to even his parents, only when he ‘strangely’ went into a somewhat depressed state. It took three more years and one rarely dedicated and gifted teacher to restore the kid’s joy in learning. HOW MANY MORE ARE THERE of such casualties out there, today, behind those small desks,‘underachieving’?!

It is about respect. I am still waiting for that concept to be seriously illuminated by one of those paragons in the series.

"children"

What an article. So many points of contention…as many have noted.

It isn’t “children” who access Facebook, it is “teenagers”.
Using the word “children” in this article is inaccurate and self serving.

What’s with: "The lecture, the textbook, homework assignments, and school are all analogies for broadcast media," whereas, "digital media allows students to be treated as individuals."?
Digital can be considered a new “broadcast media” allowing individual participation but treatment cannot be guaranteed more meaningful than in a classroom, simply more convenient.

How about “Pretty soon, teachers are going to have to get with it as their students begin to demand individual feedback and guidance rather than heaps of information they could easily find themselves.”
Individual feedback and guidance are the mark of a good teacher; heaps of information is the Internet!
Years ago I was told the Internet was the new television; I’ve recently read it’s going to crash because of too much video content. I love the Internet but the fact is it becomes a very different habit with its links and quick gratification...

As for letting the “children lead”…
While our curriculum fails children badly in some respects, “children” cannot show us what they don't know. But yes, every good visionary or teacher is guided by the needs of the child.
Or teenager.

teenagers?

"It isn’t “children” who access Facebook, it is “teenagers”.
Using the word “children” in this article is inaccurate and self serving."

Sorry, Hawkeyes, but children are using facebook, doing instant messaging, texting, etc... Talk to any intermediate teacher at any school. Students as young as 8 have their own facebook pages. The 11 and 12 year-olds (gr. 6 and 7s) are getting talks from the police liason officers about cyber bullying.

While you may wish that it is only "teenagers" that have to deal with this stuff, you are completely wrong. I know grade 4 teachers who put stuff on the internet so their students can check on homework and ask them questions.

Time for a reality check!