Analysis Thread--Module #3

ANALYSIS THREAD: This module had a steep learning curve for me—all new technologies, and they have all mushed together in my head into a social media stew.

#1: For this reason I particularly appreciated Sarah Robbins-Bell’s ability to articulate the value of social media in this podcast: “Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future”
Sarah Robins-Bell, PhD explores the fear many educators feel in the face of technology and our students. “As educators when we feel a conflict with the new technologies that come out… what we really feel is a conflict with a shift in how we view knowledge and how we gain knowledge.” I She explores the shift in how we gain knowledge from an isolated top-down process to a more democratic, cooperative global one. Educators, she claims, are more important than ever in teaching students critical thinking skills, but most be willing to respect student knowledge, and allow students to be co-creators of information, expecting them to contribute a high quality response/product. According to Robbins-Bell, today’s educators are "the last cohort of educators who will remember life before technology." I plan to share this podcast with my faculty. We have a mix of older teachers who shy away from any technology (one Social Studies teacher still uses filmstrips) and younger teachers who are willing to explore technology, but are still following the teacher-centered model, and a few who use technology but are satisfied for students to grab facts and regurgitate them. However, even with our best teachers, I see a serious problem with student engagement—they do not see school as relevant to their lives. Robbins-Bell’s ideas about incorporating social media and giving students more power and responsibility may be the cure for this.

#2: 10 ways school librarians should be teaching social media on SocialLibrarian
This post provides excellent, practical advice for using social media to connect students to the library curriculum, conduct research, publish work and build a sense of community. Since social media already attracts young people, the writer suggests capitalizing on this by removing the irrelevant stuff and tailoring the media to meet the needs of our patrons. She suggests using social media to conduct reference interviews, establish a network of resources, and solicit feedback from the community. She encourages librarians to publish their research through interactive media, like blogs and wikis in order to improve one’s professional profile. Social media can also be used to give students a positive web profile by creating portfolios of good work. I like the emphasis on building critical thinking skills and ethical use of information. Particularly relevant for me were some of the author’s discussion of the misconceptions about social media like Twitter because these misconceptions belonged to me before I began this class. Since I should be at the forefront of new technology as a school librarian, it is important that I educate myself about the real applications of this technology. I will try to remember this lesson in the future when new technologies come out and my initial reaction is skepticism based on ignorance.

#3: Cotelco is a collaborative project of American and Syracuse Universities to encourage collaboration and technology enhanced learning communities with an additional focus on making technology available to diverse groups, globally, and those with disabilities. The article ” Diversity Matters, Even at a Distance: Evaluating the Impact of Computer-Mediated Communication on Civil Society Participation in the World Summit on the Information Society” discusses the difficulties of providing access to technologies for all people’s around the world.

However, there are serious challenges affecting the participation of civil society in global multi-stakeholder governance processes such as WSIS. For example, these organizations vary tremendously in size, strength, experience, organizational capacity, ICT policy issue area, and focus. Perhaps the biggest hurdle is that the members of these organizations are geographically distributed and can have a presence in both developed and developing countries. Finding ways to knit these geographically distributed and diverse organizational strands into a coherent and representative international civil society tapestry that functions as an effective transnational advocacy network drawing on the best epistemic communities from around the world and engaging effectively in the highly complex WSIS institutional processes is a significant challenge.
The article does not specifically address inclined technology in education, but the implication that if one is to have a voice in the future, that voice will rely on one’s access and ability to use technology. These are the skills that we need to be teaching our students (and teachers). While my high school students see themselves as computer literate, their skills are actually quite limited. They are unable to find information unless it pops up quickly in a Google search. They struggle to sift though information to find relevant ideas, and struggle even further to synthesize those ideas into a meaningful product. This does not bode well for their future as global citizens.

#4 “Critical Transformations” –a presentation by Don Tapscott, the author of Growing Up Digital
This brief presentation offers an interesting analysis of the current generation of students. He says that while the world has changed dramatically based on technology, school have changed very little. Tapscott defines this generation as one who spend time on the web rather than watching television:
“…so you have a generation that rather than being the passive recipients of someone else’s broadcast are the actors and initiators and collaborators and researchers and rememberers and so an and this is a huge and powerful force to change the schools because as these kids come into the school system the old model of learning is completely inappropriate for them…information technology is the new model for collaborative working”
This is a message that I have heard repeated throughout my research for this class, and yet it is a message that today’s educators are not hearing. Recently a 2nd grade teacher told me she thought the interest in technology in schools was a passing phase…by the time her students hit high school, they’ll be bored with it. This is an intelligent person and an experienced teacher with three teenage children (all wired) and yet she can not even imagine the revolution that is taking place right under her nose. I put myself, and most other adults, in the same group. Before my school library media studies, I saw technology as a way to enhance traditional classroom lessons, instead of as a way to transform the entire structure of education. If we don’t begin to give some power to our students to create their own learning, we will certainly lose them.

#5 Jay McTighe on Critical Transformation

I could relate to McTighe’s comments about the transformation he experienced as a teacher. He claims: “I began teaching with the assumption that my job was to tell students everything I knew about certain topics…and then I had this aha moment and it dawned on me that my job was to get them to make sense of the content, make meaning for themselves and to use what they were learning in new situations”

After this aha moment, McTighe’s teaching transformed; he began asking more questions and shifted from “show me what you know to show me what you can do” As a new teacher, I modeled my teaching on my teachers: knowledgeable, engaging, confident, and very much the center of the classroom. To give up this place in the center of the class would have meant that I failed as a teacher. However, I am coming to see that the only way I can succeed as a teacher-librarian is to give up this role as queen bee. An additional challenge is to encourage other teachers to transform their teaching style.