ICT for Schools: What you buy is what you think

When I have a difficult subject to discuss, I sometimes like to start off with a graph to visualise my ideas and the complexity of the subject. The first draft of this one was hand-made. I did it during a discussion I had with teachers about choices of ICT equipment, systems and applications. I argued that you need to have a sound framework for ICT decision-making in education.

Any choice that you can make has multiple reasons and consequences. Decision about ICT in education are always – consciously or unconsciously – based on a theory about and a vision on learning and teaching, media and society. Most of the time people are not conscious about their own theories that are guiding their choices and they rarely have a realistic idea of what effects of their decisions will have on learning, teaching and school organisation for instance.

If you are in favor of a computer lab you have a different view on learning organisation and learning processes than if you prefer distributed equipment. The same is true if you expect a wireless laptop cart to be the best solution for using ICT with your students. If you think you need specialised educational software you probably also have a different view on learning, literacy, instruction and teaching than if you prefer production-oriented software with no predefined content. In case you have a limited budget for equipment, the decision to spend it on interactive whiteboards says something about your teaching concept. It probably differs from the concept someone has, who would prefer to spend the same amount on computers with free software, cameras, camcorders, digital microscopes or robotics sets first. The second fosters simultaneous and autonomous hands on activity by many, the first promotes centralized lecture style activity of one at a time.

Most decision makers have hardly an overview on the short term and long term effects of the decisions they make. Some effects are purely financial or technical. Of course they ought to be considered even if for the moment your budget is big enough.

Some effects are organisational. A computer lab for instance is fine, if you don’t use computers on a daily bases. If the classes who use it are few and if you are near to the lab, you can use it whenever it’s free. If every teacher wants his time share for using the lab and if there are many teachers and classes, they will have access once a week or once every two weeks. If at the assigned time a technical or organisational problem comes up, you will have to come back two weeks later – unfortunately that’s when you had planned your field trip. The same logic applies to mobile systems like laptop carts.

The most important however are the effects on teaching and learning. Do the invest in ICT serve old ideas with new means or are your invests a stepping stone to new educational practices? And, what else is needed to implement new educational practices?

As an educational ICT consultant I have experienced that teachers' views are often guided by considerations of high availability (for themselves and for today), handling, short term productivity, control, fast familiarisation, and technical modernism.

Schoolboards and politicians are focused on costs and social equity, but sometimes, if the salesman has good convincing skills, their hunger for modernism overwhelms their decisions, with the consequence that costly hype equipment is bought without any noticeable effect on education.

Technicians mostly concentrate on reliability, efficiency, maintenance and standardisation, but are also driven by ideology and by the option to take control over the technology and the users.

Architects are generally concerned about budget limits – if equipment is part of the project package – about design issues of cabling and computer furniture.

In the end what is lacking is a sound framework connecting teaching, learning, equipment and software to guide people to choose from all the options that are available.

Which is the dominant learning and teaching style in our school today, and where do we want to go from here? Which technological strategy will help us develop our school? Which are the competencies that our students really need to develop, when we consider that they are three, eight or fifteen years from entering the job market or playing an active part in social, economical or political “adult” life? Which are the competencies that teachers need to develop in order to serve as guides or even role models for their students? What are the implicit and explicit “messages” to the learners and the community, of the different hardware of software solutions that schools can choose from? Are students treated as responsible autonomous learners or are they vessels to fill with information that is expected to morph into knowledge? Do we talk about standards to the learners meaning specific software that “everyone” uses in the office, or do we talk about standards in the sense of information management, communication, non-linear production processes and so forth. Are ethics, authorship and empowerment important aspects of schools considerations, and are they connected to technology, or are technological resources seen as value free “tools”? Is the learner in control of the machine or is the machine in control of the learner? And who controls the machine that controls the learner?

Such questions are never left unanswered even if they are not raised. At least the answers are hidden in the choices schools make regarding hardware, software and distribution of technology.

At times where choices have to been made, my graph doesn’t necessary simplify the task but it helps to critically analyse possible scenarios and describe the interconnectedness of some major layers that maybe considered.

Constructing oral narratives online

Ages ago, I participated in a R&D Project called TEO. I was a primary school teacher then, back in 1994. The project's main objectives were to develop a software to record narratives using a computer, and to use this application to practice oral language skills. The tool was called TEO - meaning Text Editor Oral. It worked under the old MacOS 9.

We used TEO in primary school but tested it also in special needs education and in Kindergarten. In primary school, students aged from 7 to 12 used it to record self invented narratives in French, which is the 3rd language that is taught in Luxembourg from 2nd grade up, after Luxembourgish and German.

In TEO, the narratives could be edited by adding and deleting recording parts, or by rearraging them using drag and drop. Each recording was represented by a simple icon that could be used for these manipulations, there were no complex soundwaves or timelines. The icons were automatically numbered so that you could easily tell if the recordings had been rearranged, if parts had been added or deleted.

The theoretical framework of the project was a constructivist view on second language acquisition, embedded in a multilingual context and based on a concept of 'Storying' - meaning a narrative approach to language production. Collaboration, using and sharing implicit language knowledge, students' voice, self-evaluation, students' control over their productions and autonomy were major tenets of the framework.

The tool was great and so easy to handle, that very young children had no difficulty to work with it without any assistance from elders or adults. The project was e great success, which means that students made enormous progress in oral French without a lot of instructive teaching. They eagerly constructed narratives with the knowledge they shared and were not at all afraid of expressing themselves in a language they hardly mastered, mainly because they were not forced to speak in front a class and they had full control over their recordings. If they were not satisfied with the sentence they produced they could just drop it and have another try without leaving traces of "failure". Anyone knows that this is reassuring but you seldom work under such conditions in school.

Of course you could misuse the application for drill and practice exercises but the overall project's framework and the teachers' views on language acquisition prevented such an approach.

The project lasted one year and was documented in a written report, three videos showing children at work and a multimedia CD-Rom explaining and illustrating the framework. Unfortunately the documentations haven't been reedited yet or put online, so that they aren't available any more except for my own report of that time which can be found online on my other website. http://www.fiermonte.lu/resources/wiki/Education/TEO.shtml

After the official R&D project was over, two additional Windows PC versions had been developed with the funding of two other projects, and a few teachers continued to work with it although the PC version was hardly running stable. There was no large scale implementation, promotion or distribution of it after that.

TEO was not forgotten but it didn't last long as nobody seemed to be interested to finance software maintenance in order keep pace with the development of operating systems, and software libraries. But that's the way things often go with R&D projects.

In the early years of EducDesign we wanted to develop a new version of the application for the Ministry of Education in Luxembourg but we got no funding for that either, so we finally decided to do it on our own.

Instead of TEO we called it Tiparlo which in Italian means "I speak to you". We created an online browser based version of the tool and added also some great new features like export into mp3, adding images and comments and setting access rights. It works fine with most common browser in their latest versions. Up until this year Tiparlo could not be used independently of a global OLEFA CMS/IMS based Website in which Tiparlo is part of an online software suite called Collaboration Server which contains other modules like Storyboard, Painter, Webbook and Wiki.
As some people asked us if there was no other way to get it, because they had no support from their schoolboard or the Ministry of Education to get an OLEFA based website, we decided to give it a try and offer Tiparlo separately. Well, it's online now and it can be found at http://www.tiparlo.com.

Its main objective is still to encourage authentic oral expression, communication and language reflection. Tiparlo is very helpful to keep track of someone’s language development or second language acquisition. It fosters cooperation and autonomy, peer tutoring, learning from one another, self-evaluation and critical thinking.

Tiparlo is perfect for minimal invasive language "teaching" and for second language acquisition in multilingual contexts where students share their explicit and implicit language knowledge in meaningful situations.

I know that a lot of teachers would prefer closed applications where students listen to phrases and words, repeat them and get a right or wrong, and a score. With such tools students can also work on their own and you don't need to spend to much time on their productions. The number of rights and wrongs says everything you need to know. But that's not the way I like to promote IT in school.

With Tiparlo it's different. It's not the teacher or the tool that controls the production and the learning but the students themselves. To evaluate the learning processes, you need listen to the narratives, consider the context in which the production process took place and have a discussion with your students. Now and then it may be interesting to film or to record the discussions among the students during the production process. Not with the "big brother is listening" approach but with permission of the authors, if you want to get a somehow authentic work and have a respectful relationship with your students. Such "teaching" demands a lot of effort, much more that if you use closed ready made applications, but the results are worth it and have much more impact on the language acquisition progress than forever popular drill and kill exercises, which in my view are an insult to the intelligence and the creativity of children, who always prove to be born language learners when embedded in a language rich context.

Bad times for teachers and students stealing images

As a producer of web technologies that provide teachers and learners with online content production tools I often find myself involved in a discussion around the legitimacy to use images found on the internet in students' and teachers' personal projects.

Although teachers over the globe complain that the internet facilitates plagiarism and encourages copying and pasting of text they usually don't show the same criticism when it comes to using/stealing pictures and graphical data.

It is quite common that teachers themselves consider the web as a free online clip art gallery and that they see no harm in using whatever they can find to pimp up their worksheets, slides or website pages without crediting their sources.

No wonder then, that they apply the same logic to images that students can find and copy-paste to decorate their personal printed or online work. Obviously teachers' sensitivity is different depending of the nature of the data that is used or stolen. In school, written text has a much higher status than an image. While copying and pasting graphical data is considered common practice, copying text without quotation marks and indications of the source is considered being a unscrupulous temptation to cheat and to avoid personal effort.

With TinEye by Idée Inc. now comes a search engine based on an image identification technology capable of finding images and variations of images on the internet. TinEye provides authors of visual data with an easy way to detect copies of their creations on websites even if the original version has been cropped, scaled, merged, renamed or colored.

Of course this is not the only application of TinEye but it is one that could have a major effect on schools.

My advice to teachers: Start today with using license free images (for example from Wikimedia Commons) or own creations. Don't make a difference between respecting authors of written text, of sound productions or of images, name your sources and teach your students to do the same.

(Got the hint from Slashdot)

Image source and copyright information :

"This is a faithful photographic reproduction of an original two-dimensional work of art. The original image comprising the work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:

This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. (...)"

What teachers can learn from new approaches in archaeology

In analogy to archeology, pedagogical reflection doesn't deal with an objective truth or evidence but with a subjective construction which can become - sometimes only for a limited period - a shared truth in a given social context.
For example, an archaeological discovery like a female figurine can be seen as a religious object, or a symbol for fertility, or evidence for a matriarchal society, depending on an archaeologist interpretation of the context where it has been found and on his specific view.

In archaeology like in education different people will tell different stories about a situation or an artifact, a text, an answer, a drawing, an excavated object etc. There is no immediate self-evident nature of a learning outcome as there is no self-evident nature of an archaeological discovery. Decontextualized they become more and more difficult, sometimes even impossible to interpret and the stories told are closer to speculation than to reality.

If from a certain point of view there seems to be an objective evidence than, from a different point of view, others could well have found a different truth. Does this mean that anything is equally true or that the truth is always a bit of everything?
I don't think that extreme relativism, which I encounter frequently in my work with schools, is helpful. Most of the time it is a way to avoid to take a stand, to express an opinion for or against an interpretation and in consequence to avoid that ones opinion could be refuted by others. And, extreme relativism is often a way to avoid to make a decision and to be taken responsible for its possible consequences.

In "Towards reflexive method in archaeology : the example at Çatalhöyük" Ian Hodder, a postprocessual archaeologist describes a new aproach in archaelogy based on reflexive startegies that can be used to work your way through negotiated interpretations in a given context. Hodder calls this approach "reflexive method".

He enumerates a set of twelve methodologies and describes four resp. five themes which I think could be applied to education. After having read the following quotes try to read them again with the word "archaeological" substituted by "pedagogical" or "educational":

In analogy to archeology, pedagogical reflection doesn't deal with an objective truth or evidence but with a subjective construction which can become - sometimes only for a limited period - a shared truth in a given social context.
For example, an archaeological discovery like a female figurine can be seen as a religious object or a toy or a symbol for fertility or evidence for a matriarchal society, depending on an archaeologist interpretation of the context where the figurine has been found and on the archaelogist's specific view.
In an educational context, a non-compliant behavior of a student can be regarded differently depending on the situation where this behavior could be observed, and of course the point of view of the observer. The reason for the behavior could be found in the situation itself or be seen in the broader social context that the child lives in.


Reflexivity,
"By this I mean the examination of the effects of archaeological assumptions and actions on the verious communities involved in an archaeological process."

Relationality or contextuality
"The notion here is that meaning is relational. This emphasis is seen in the reflexive attempts to relate findings to a specific context of knowledge production. but the emphasis is also visible in the inter-relations of contextual and artefactual information."

Interactivity
"The aim here is to provide machanisms for people to question and criticize archaeological interpretations that are being made, as they are being made. (...) The prioritizing (sampling) procedures are arrived at by negotiation between staff members. (...) Interactivity is also facilitated ... by the provision of the data base on the Web (...) and by the provision of information in diary and video form that situates the data base and opens it up for critique and alternative interpretation."

Multivocality
"A wide range of different groups often have conflicting interest in the past and wish to be engaged in the archaeological process in different ways. (...) Mechanisms need to be provided so that different discourses can take place."

"An additional theme can be described as "non-dichotomous thinking" that is the breaking down and questioning of categories and boundaries. (...) It is necessary to bridge the divide between archaeology as either science or humanity either history or anthropology, as either objective or subjective."

To give you an impression on this reflective approach in action visit the official website of the site in Turkey's Anatolian plain known as Çatalhöyük : http://www.catalhoyuk.com

Rethinking Storytelling with Storied Navigation

The MIT Media Lab has published an interesting research project called "Storied Navigation". The project is based on an idea developed by Edward Yu-Te Shen. His thesis has been published under the title and subtitle Storied Navigation : Toward Media Collection-Based Storytelling.

Storied Navigation is said to be novel approach and a tool to construct narratives based on a collection of annotated media sequences like videos and audios. The system is coupled with so called commonsense reasoning technology which helps the user extend his narrative by suggesting related and indexed sequences that could be webbed into the plot.

When reading Yu-Te Shen's thesis I encountered quite a few ideas which reminded me of Ricki Goldam-Segall's work. Goldman-Segall inspired me a lot during the MIRA-Project, when I developed Multimedia Clipboard. I must say that I am a bit surprised, that neither Ricki Goldman-Segall, video ethnography, constructivism or constructionism are mentioned in the references of the thesis, nor the database system Constellations that has been designed by the Media Lab "to enable a community of researchers to catalog, describe, and meaningfully organize data they have collected and stored in digital format or data that is available on the World Wide Web." I'm also surprised because the reader of Yu-Te Shen's thesis is Glorianna Davenport with whom Goldam-Segall collaborated during her Media Lab years where researched under the guidance of Seymour Papert. But maybe it's just because of the fact that the MIT has developed so many technological projects that they stopped referencing them in every thesis.

Anyway, Storied Navigation is an interesting approach and it seems to be a powerful piece of software for educational use. I can easily imagine that it could serve to create digital learning records or conduct ethnographic inquiries to enter into discourse with others - teachers, students, parents - about learning in multiple situations and contexts. Such a tool can also help making sense of and help discover patterns in fragmented or apparently disconnected experiences by tagging and packaging multimedia sequences, descriptions and interpretations.

Of course we shouldn't underestimate that, whatever tool we use for such purposes, recording, collecting and indexing raw data is very time consuming. We also need to acknowledge the fact that meaning is something we don't discover but something that we construct and the possibility that open tools reveal the thinking of the observer as much as the thinking of the observed. Furthermore, depending on the tools we use to produce meaning and to communicate our points of view, they will be different and, valued and understood differently by others.

Website of Storied Navigation
Project abstract with link to Master Thesis
Edward Yu-Te Shen's blog
Edward Yu-Te Shen's blog in English

Thinking Tools for Parallelism and Decentralized Systems

Is the ethanol production responsible for the rising corn prices and thus responsible for the rising of food prices or is the subprime crisis the reason for all this, and if, where is the connection? Why are the milk prices dropping in Europe, while simultaneously other food prices are increasing and while China is buying high quantities of milk on the global market - isn't there a contradiction? Is the fuel price increasing because there is shortage of oil resources or is it because of the dropping of the dollar, or is the price part of a strategy to push ethanol production? Or if we all pushed ethanol production would it force crude oil prices to drop?

Even if people tend to think so, the phenomena that can be observed are seldom the fruit of centralized control or clear intentions but of decentralized actions and interactions, parallelism, randomness and self-organization. There is no mono-directional causality, but parallel emergence of multiple situations that act simultaneously and generate effects and patterns that mostly couldn't have been anticipated.

Unfortunately, linear thinking models, coupled with memorization and regurgitation of facts are not the best ways to train people to understand complex emergent phenomena and to find creative solutions to unexpected problems like those that arose recently on a macroeconomic level.

Most of our thinking strategies, school curricula, and tools for learning are all rooted in the paper and pencil area. Even thinking tools like mind-maps which help visualizing the interconnectedness of ideas, aspects, causes and effects in a two dimensional and non-linear way are seldom used in school. And if they were, they are not suited to represent the dynamic of systems.

In order to understand the decentralized nature of social, economical or natural phenomena we need to observe and explore the functioning of decentralized systems and overcome the "centralized mindset" as Mitchel Resnick calls it. This can be achieved through the use of tools like Scratch, StarLogo and StarLogo TNG, which offer a graphical programming environment and which have been developed at the Media Lab under the direction of M. Resnick.

Whereas StarLogo, StarLogo TNG and OpenStarLogo don't seem to be very popular yet, there is a growing community creating and publishing Scratch projects, probably also due to the dedicated website, a Youtube stile sharing portal. Have a look here.

Designing Tools for Evaluation

Back in 2000-2002 during a research project called MIRA Multimedia Interface for Research and Authoring I created a tool for reflective practitioners in school called Multimedia Clipboard. Later on, most of the features of this tool have been integrated into the OLEFA IMS-CMS http://www.olefa.com which offers a powerful web based environment including a database module that can be designed and personalized for multiple uses.

Multimedia Clipboard permitted the collecting and grouping of multiple types of data in order to create layered and multi-perspective descriptions and interpretations of learning situations.
With this kind of tools teachers can evaluate students learning products and processes by creating chunks of information, and include background information of situations and concepts in which these products, processes and their interpretation are embedded.

Once an item is created by importing for example a video clip, the interpretation can be broadened by adding descriptions from different perspectives (comments by students, peers, teachers, parents etc.) and deepened or "thickened" by adding layers of information and interpretation (see the concept of "thick descriptions" by Clifford Geertz and Gilbert Ryle).
This approach is a lot different from a quantitative evaluation, but also from a so called evaluation by competencies in which learning is split up into modules, key stages and key competencies and in which students learning outcomes are, in the end, always compared to normative clusters of knowledge.

The greatest difference however lies in the fact that evaluation by competencies is proclaimed to be formative but neither sets the learner nor the teacher in the focus of an inquiry but the implicit norms.

In opposition to this, a descriptive and interpretive (ethnographic) approach puts the learner and the teacher(s) in the focus because their judgments, ethical considerations and theories become part of the evaluation process. Here, teachers are not observers, but actors in a learning process, and an evaluation is created or co-constructed through collaboration and negotiation. And, students are not objects of evaluation and inquiry but co-evolving subjects. A tool like Multimedia Clipboard is as much a instrument for evaluation as a means to gain insight in the functioning of evaluation and the nature and power of the hidden theories involved - including those which gave birth to the tool itself. Furthermore, and because of the non-linearity of the tool, a small change in the tool has the potential to open a high variety of new possibilities to interconnect information. A small change in a check list of competences - which I consider to be a linear system - will never have such an impact.

By adopting open instruments and ethnographic approaches, evaluation will take the shape of a narrative based on self-organization and reflection instead of a diagnosis conforming to a given structure. We will also reach a high level of unpredictability, variety, redundancy and even messiness, while simultaneously reducing centralized control and normative comparability between individual learning outcomes. On the other hand we will open to all actors involved a space for self-reflection, creativity and double-loop learning.

As there is a growing demand for alternative forms to evaluate students learning, I think that evaluation by normative competencies cannot be but a transitional stage before adopting open tools like Multimedia Clipboard which will extend the possibilities and concepts of so called learning records and portfolios and which will at the same time force teachers in a position of self-reflection.

Collaborative Storytelling with Avatars and Robots as Peers

I would like to draw your attention to the Research Projects of the ArticuLab at the School of Communication / School of Engineering at the Northwestern University.
At first glance the projects "Collaborative Storytelling with a Virtual Peer", "Storytelling with a virtual peer as an intervention for children with autism" and the project "Alex: Culturally Authentic Virtual Peer" seem to emphasize the benefit of using digital avatars in a learning process. This I suppose may chock many parents or teachers, but I find them most interesting because all these projects are based on a solid theoretical and conceptional framework on literacy development. The researchers emphasize the importance of collaboration, play, role-taking, imagination, storytelling, co-authoring and socio-cultural norms during language learning. Even for teachers or parents who are very critical about the use of computers in education it could be interesting to have a closer look at these research projects because they could help them better understand the mechanisms of learning in a given socio-cultural and/or educational environment and also how important it is for children to participate in collaborative literacy activities like narratives or play. If considered, the research projects could contribute to improve education even without the use of information technology because they offer new settings in which can be described the impact of social interaction and communication and of a child's imagination during the process of developing literacy skills.
The projects of the ArticuLab have a lot in common with the Aurora of the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the Science and Technology Research Institute at the University of Hertfordshire where researches have developed a humanoid robot called KASPAR instead of virtual peers and where they study its possible beneficial influence on children with learning difficulties or autism.

Free dictionaries

Some online educational portals try to convince teachers and students to subscribe because they offer "for free" commercial resources like online dictionaries and encyclopedias. For free - meaning that the state has spent enormous sums to pay licenses. I can't help but finding this strategy quite odd as there are lots of useful yet really free resources on the net that most Internet literate students know about and use on a daily basis during homework.

Here are some of my favourite online dictionaries which I use:
http://dict.leo.org
http://www.dict.cc/
http://www.lexilogos.com/
http://www.thefreedictionary.com


NetLingo.com - The Internet Dictionary with thousands of terms about the online world of business, technology, and communication, including acronyms, text messaging shorthand, smileys, and more :-)

Wikia

Going live of wikia - the new Wiki search engine. Le's be patient it's just the beginning. Don't expect to find what you are looking for until a collaborative community has been attracted and formed around the wiki farm. I will certainly keep an eye on this project.

At EducDesign we have been working on our own search engine for a while now. As a matter of fact, the idea was born two years ago. It's also only a first version but we think I could be growing rapidly. It's strongly focused on education and it's meant to be fed by people posting interesting sites they have discovered. If you want to have a look, visit the project at www.schoosi.com.