Twitter: it's still about the connections

The current consensus is that Twitter is for oldies, and that younger people (particularly those under 30) don't tend to use it. Whilst we must avoid sweeping statements, and accept that some young people do actually use Twitter on a regular basis, some recent polls such as the Pearson and Babson Survey have suggested that only 2% of teachers have used it to communicate with their students. The survey, which was conducted in the U.S., says that Facebook and Youtube are the tools of choice for college students.

But let's stop one moment and think about this. We need to take care that we don't pigeon hole the use of social media (or any other tool for that matter) within age limits. It's just as rediculous to claim that only old people use wheelchairs. We made this mistake when we swallowed Marc Prensky's digital natives and immigrants theory whole. In hindsight, we now know that age is not a determining factor in whether or not we effectively use digital media. In fact, Dave White's alternative theory - visitors and residents, is a much more appropriate explanatory model in this context. Dave argues that residents are those who habituate themselves within particular media and virtual environments, and therefore have a deeper understanding and appreciation of the nuances and affordances of the tools they are using. On the other hand, visitors tend to know a lot less about the tools they are using if they only use/visit them intermittently. This explains in a more convincing way why some become very skillful in using technologies, whilst others struggle to master them. It may also provide an explanation about how people choose their social media tools - often because of the utility they perceive it can offer them, and in the case of social networking, by whoever else might also be already using the tool.

A recent discussion on Twitter (about the use of Twitter!) resulted in a number of interesting points being made about the way people adopt, exploit and develop their use of social media. There are clearly a number of different reasons why people use social networks, whether socially, professionally and for personal learning development. My suspicion is that people will choose different tools for different purposes, and consider their options based on who else uses the tools in question. There is evidence that several schools are using Twitter and other social media in everyday teaching. Dave Mitchell (Deputy Head Teacher at Heathfield Primary School in Lancashire) uses Twitter with his Year 6 students on a regular basis, and has reported very positive results. Dan Roberts (Deputy Head Teacher at Saltash.Net Secondary School in Cornwall) is also using Twitter and other social media of all types on a regular basis and has reported some very creative and award winning outcomes.

Dan Kennedy (an under-30 teacher at the Grange Secondary School in Dorset) pointed out that the main reason he uses Twitter is because his community - those he wishes to connect with - are best contacted using it. This should give us a clue that the use of Twitter, or any other social media tool, is not about age, but more about community. It's not so much about when you were born, but where you place yourself in the terrain of digital connection. Twitter is also about sharing - emotions, experiences, resources and great ideas. In Why Twitter is so Powerful, I made the following point:

Twitter is not so much about the information and useful links you can gain access to. Twitter is powerful because it allows people to share their emotions - you can gain a window on their everyday experiences, and that often helps you in your own daily struggles. I am often encouraged by people who share snapshots of what is happening in their lives right now. It's an important dimension - I have made many friends on Twitter whom I have later met and strengthened my friendships with. Self disclosure is a risky thing, but others often reciprocate. It can all be summed up by a quote from one of my favourite authors: "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What!? You too? I thought I was the only one." - C. S. Lewis

Quote of the day goes to Chris Betcher who tweeted this: "Twitter makes me like people I’ve never met and Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life!”

Image source by Fotopedia


Twitter: it's still about the connections by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What's so innovative about ICT?

I was recently invited to write a post for the Dell Education blog. Below is my article, which first appeared on the Dell website on 22 April, 2010.

In my role as an academic researcher in learning, I am often asked the same question: What is so innovative about ICT in schools? I assume that people ask this question because they are so used to seeing computers they have forgotten what the world was like before they arrived. I usually respond by starting off with an examination of what ‘ICT’ actually means. ICT - Information and Communication Technology - is more than just computers. In education, it’s really better referred to as ‘learning technology’ and I made my views clear about this recently in a blog post entitled ‘Stop calling it ICT!’. Whatever we call it, it’s a term that embraces an entire spectrum of tools, including the Internet and World Wide Web, telecommunications, cameras and audio, mobile phones, computer games, and other interactive devices in the classroom, such as Interactive Whiteboards, turtles and pixies (small programmable floor robots) and voting systems. We limit our vision if we simply see learning technology as ‘computers’, but I concede that computers are often the gateway into many of the above tools.


So just what is so innovative about this spectrum of tools? There are three key points I want to make to answer this question, and they all relate to what I term ‘affordances’ – the attributes of the technology that we perceive are useful to us. I wrote about this recently in a post on my own personal blog which I called ‘Angels in the Architecture’.

The first innovative quality of learning technology is that it has a flexibility and provisionally that supports learning across the sectors, from reception classes through to higher education and lifelong learning. Remember the time when you had to retype something, or use Tippex, if you made a mistake? You probably won’t if you are under 35 years old. When word processors were first introduced into education, they were an absolute Godsend to many people, particularly students who were writing long essays or teachers who had to create a large amount of content. The provisionally of the computer, not only in terms of text manipulation, but also images, sounds and video, means that the computer and learning technology in general have become indispensable for most people who find themselves studying or teaching.

Secondly, learning technology can be a platform for creativity. Creativity is often overlooked in learning – especially if it’s not art or music. We need to acknowledge that creativity is an important aspect of learning across the curriculum. We need to think laterally when trying to solve some mathematics or science problems for example. When we write essays, read literature, or learn a new language, we need to call upon our imagination and creative skills to make sense of the learning resources. Learning technology supports, and often extends our creative skills, and can act as a ‘mindtool’ for us to develop our thinking skills too. We can store all our thoughts, useful collections of knowledge and questions in the memory of our device, and then leave it there until we next need it, thereby freeing up thinking space for the immediate problems at hand.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly, learning technology is very effective in connecting people together, and enabling them to share their ideas, resources and comments online. Social networking tools, blogs and wikis are just a few of the tools that are in common use in education, where students and teachers can create content, share, discuss, vote, and otherwise participate in a community that extends beyond the boundaries of the traditional classroom. We are only at the start of the innovation curve of learning technology. The provisionally and flexibility of the tool, its capability to harness and amplify creativity, and its ability to connect people together wherever and whenever they are in the world, will ensure that learning technologies will continue to be innovative in education.

There are many more things I could say about the innovative nature of the tools that we call ICT – the learning technologies – but space and time do not permit. In conclusion, I will give this word of advice to any teacher in any sector of education: Don’t be afraid to take some risks with technology – if you can think of an idea to use in your classroom, it is very likely that there is a learning technology tool out there that can help you realise it.


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Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Learning spaces and places

This entire series on technology affordances was started off by a remark I made during the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference, and my subsequent blogpost which I called 'Angels in the architecture'. I kicked off the series proper with a post called 'Can we afford to ignore student perceptions?' in which I highlighted the fact that affordances are emergent attributes of the design that are based on perceptions, and we must therefore be careful how we select technologies to support learning. Sometimes, if the design affordances do not match the needs of the learner, the result can be disasterous. More recently, in posts entitled 'Push or Pull' and 'Squeezing out the good stuff', I tried to outline some of the important affordances that have become evident when people use social media for learning.

In this part of the series I want to identify two more key sets of affordances that I believe will affect the success of technologies when they are applied to learning. The first I will call the 'synthesised space' affordances - the capability of the tool to create mixed media or blended spaces. I began to discuss this in a paper I published last year in Future Internet entitled Learning Space Mashups. What I was referring to was not a mashup in the strictest sense of the word, but rather a blending of reflective (blog) and collaborative (wiki) web tools to create a synthesised space where students could benefit from the best of both sets of affordances. There are many other web based tools available that can be combined and experimented with so that new spaces can be created. We just haven't got around to it yet, but the true mashups are a good start. Google Maps and similar mashup spaces are leading the way, and I believe we will see more tools combined in the future. Opening up API and allowing users to become developers is the main reason why some start ups such as Flickr and Delicious became so popular so quickly.


The second set of affordances I want to highlight we might call 'navigation' affordances. By navigation, I mean the visual cues that enable users to find their way around to learn spatially, both visually and in terms of hyperlinked pathways. If a web tool is badly designed, as is the case with some institutional VLEs, students become confused and disoriented. They know where they need to be and what they want to find, but can't easily find their way there. They then waste too much time trying to work out how to navigate themselves, or go off to try to find someone who can help them. If the 'browsability' element is lacking, or the tool has a poor capability to search for content, more problems are caused for learners. Broken links or links that are not adequately signposted/hihglighted are also annoying and are usually a problem caused by lack of maintenance, or simply poor design.


Navigation affordances are all about getting about - where the learners find themselves, and where they want to go to can be interrupted if the tool has not been designed effectively. The end result of any of the above problems, is that students spend more time thinking about how to navigating their way around in their study space than they do about the content and the learning. Opaque technologies need to become more transparent. Designing the correct features into the tool will enable the affordances of the tool to come to emerge.

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Learning spaces and places by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Push or pull

Whenever I am trying to explain the concept of affordances, I use the idea of a door handle like the one in this photo. I point out that for a right handed person, the door handle has an affordance for twisting clockwise and pushing (or pulling) - to open the door. The design features of the handle help the user to perceive what action can be made with the object.

Many technologies used for learning have several affordances. Some are more apparent than others, and this is sometimes the problem. Hartson tried to categorise between affordances in the context of interaction, identifying four types: Cognitive (thinking), physical, sensory and functional (Hartson, 2003). One of the overarching affordances of learning technologies though, particularly those that fall into the category of Web 2.0 tools, tends to cut across all of Hartson's categories - the social affordance of the tools.

Wikis for example, have a number of social affordances - users can perceive a co-operative affordance that enables them to create content that may not agree, but which can sit side by side to provide a balanced and measured take on a given subject. There is also a collaborative affordance where users can combine, interweave and mix their content to create a comprehensive account of the topic. I use both these approaches to encourage students to explore thoroughly the topics they need to learn about and published the results of my research in articles in two papers, The Good, the Bad and the Wiki, and Using Wikis to Promote Quality Learning (both full papers for download). By cooperating, and in some cases (more difficult) collaborating on the wiki, students can become more critical in the way they acquire knowledge and synthesise their ideas. The discursive affordance is probably the most powerful affordance of wikis. The perception that no knowledge or opinion is fixed or immutable is a powerful attribute of wikis. Negotiation of meaning and an ongoing dialogue between students yields a number of positive outcomes, not least that learners can all contribute to the ongoing generation of content, and that the wisdom of the crowd will ensure that in most cases, content will be reasonably accurate and can be reused and repurposed to good effect.

Social affordances are obviously important if we are in the business of promoting socially constructed learning in all its forms.

Reference

Hartson, H. R. (2003) Cognitive, physical, sensory and functional affordances in interaction design. Behaviour and Information Technology, 22 (5), 315-338.

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Push or pull by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Squeezing out the good stuff

Yesterday I wrote a post concerning the concept of affordances, and I promised a whole series examining the affordances of digital media - learning technologies. One of the best articles I have read on affordances in digital media has to be the one written by Matt Bower which looked at matching learning tasks to technologies. It's a sensible, no nonsense take on the spectrum of possible digital media affordances, and it provides some simple, clear models of how they relate to each other. Bower shows that affordances - i.e. the perceived attributes or features of the technology - determine the actions that can be performed by the user with that technology. He quotes Donald Norman to clarify this point:

"The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could be possibly used. A chair affords ('is for') support and therefore affords sitting. A chair can also be carried" (Norman, 1988, p. 9).


One of the key affordances of digital media for me anyway, is its educational affordance. That is, all digital media have properties that allow them to be used to learn. That's important to acknowledge. Not all technologies used in education were designed for the purpose of learning. Podcasting for example, was originally designed so that people could listen to music downloaded from the Internet. Yet many schools, colleges and universities have been able to effectively harness podcasting so that its pedagogical value can be squeezed out. Although there was no special 'educational-ness' designed into podcasting, people have perceived its potential to support learning through downloaded audio files that can be sequenced and archived. And some educational podcasting projects have been very successful.


Another example is the mobile phone, which was first designed so that users could communicate at a distance and while on the move, without needing to use a fixed line telephone. Although we are seeing the demise of the telephone box on many street corners in the Western world as a result, and although we are often annoyed in public places by irritating little ring-tones, we are never-the-less able to learn on the move. We have done this by perceiving the affordance, and then creating learning objects that can be accessed through the mobile phone. These affordances go beyond its original design, tapping into the open potential of the web browser each mobile phone comes complete with.


Tomorrow I will explore another affordance of digital media, and try to make sense of it in the context of current e-learning practices.


References
Bower, M. (2008) Affordance analysis: Matching learning tasks with learning technologies. Educational Media International, 45 (1), 3-16.
Norman, D. A. (1988) The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books.


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'Squeezing out the good stuff' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Can we afford to ignore learner perceptions?

When the psychologist James J. Gibson first published his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979, he was probably unaware of the far reaching consequences of his proposals. In the book Gibson proposed his top-down model of perception, and developed the idea of affordances which he had earlier proposed in an article in 1977 entitled 'Theory of Affordances'. The Wikipedia entry on affordances states:

He [Gibson] defined affordances as all "action possibilities" latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual's ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the actor and therefore dependent on their capabilities. For instance, a set of steps which rises four feet high does not afford the act of climbing if the actor is a crawling infant. Gibson's is the prevalent definition in cognitive psychology.

There are clear implications for affordance theory in the design of digital learning environments, and as Donald Norman has argued, designers need to study people, 'to take their needs and interests into account.' Far too often, (and here I think in particular about the disasterous, constricting nature and abysmal navigation tools of some institutional Virtual Learning Environments - see my Two fingered salute post) the design of learning technologies and environments tend to reflect the needs and aspirations of the designers and the company they work for than the needs of the end user. I addressed some of the issues of design flexibility in Angels in the architecture on this blog a few days ago, and want to continue this trope for the next few blog posts. We cannot afford to ignore learner needs. We need to create learning enviroments (and tools) that reflect what they need. Therefore, we must research how students perceive their environments, and design accordingly. Over the next few days therefore, I'm going to examine some of the affordances of learning technologies and attempt to evaluate them from the perspective of the individual (but socially connected) learner.

References

Gibson, J.J. (1977) The Theory of Affordances (pp. 67-82). In R. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.) Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Norman, D. (1998) The Design of Everyday Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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'Can we afford to ignore learner perceptions?' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Widgit and they will come...

I'm sat here in a computer suite at the University of Plymouth with a bunch of my colleagues, all trying to get our heads around the new MicroSoft SharePoint software which will be unleashed upon our unsuspecting students in the Autumn term. Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war! Sighs, head scratching, bemused faces, more sighing, an 'arghh' and an occasional 'hooray', as something actually works for someone. We are investing a lot of time and effort into this, and the facilitators are sweating cobs, so I sincerely hope it gets used.

The bottom line is this - people will use a new technology or piece of software providing they see a clear benefit for it. We need to consider the affordances and constraints. We need to ask ourselves the question - what can I do with this *widget* that I couldn't do before? If the answer is 'nothing', then ditch the *widget* and get on with yer life. On the other hand, if there are new things you can do with the *widget*, then learn all you can about it, and use it to enhance learning. It's not just a case of 'build it and they will come', but more about 'how can I build it to make it welcoming?'

Is SharePoint another weapon of mass distraction? Or is it going to turn out to be a boon? Here's the secret.....Make a technology transparent and students will concentrate more on learning new things than they will on the technology.