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Kathy Schrock's Literacy in the Digital Age

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Kathy Schrock's Literacy in the Digital Age

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I have identified thirteen literacies that our students need to become well-rounded 21st-century citizens. These literacies are not taught as separate literacies but are taught across the content...

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Doug Belshaw 8 Essential Elements of Digital Literacy

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Doug Belshaw 8 Essential Elements of Digital Literacy

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Doug Belshaw - 8 Essential Elements of Digital Literacy

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Doug Belshaw - 8 Essential Elements of Digital Literacy

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Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Definition by Hybrid Pedagogy

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Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Definition by Hybrid Pedagogy

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Critical Digital Pedagogy: a Definition | Hybrid Pedagogy

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On November 21 at the OpenEd Conference in Washington, DC, Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel will present on critical digital pedagogy and MOOCs. This is the first of three articles that inspired that talk. "There is no such thing as a neutral educational process."

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1. How could one or more of these support student learning within the content?

2. What factors would you take into consideration before using the tool or site with students?

3. Share your favorites!

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From Written to Digital: The New Literacy

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From Written to Digital: The New Literacy

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Both the 21st-century economy and the careers needed to fuel it are changing at an unprecedented rate. Students must be prepared for nonlinear careers, pivoting to match the ever-changing work landscape. We thus need to rethink not just how we teach our students but what we teach our students.

The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.

Walter Isaacson, "The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution" (2014)

In his bookabout the history of the digital revolution, Walter Isaacson contends that the major innovations of the digital revolution-from the first general-purpose computer to the transistor to the iPhone-were all created by individuals who understood how to synthesize the humanities with technology. Yet even though there is much focus in higher education on how we teach using technology (e.g., e-texts, flipped classrooms, adaptive learning, personalized learning), what we teach about technology is just as important. Because technology enables students to solve problems across a range of disciplines, those of us at higher education institutions need to rethink not just how we teach our students but what we teach our students.

Digital Literacy and 21st-Century Success

In today's world, college/university graduates come into contact with a quickly evolving range of technologies and have access to a wealth of information. Students can be more successful after graduation if they are digitally literate-having learned how to identify and create digital solutions, adapt to new tools, and discover more effective and efficient ways of doing things in their fields. The use of technology has transformed every discipline and career, from engineers to doctors to politicians. Yet the traditional academic experience does not prepare many students for the challenges they'll face in these professions today. For instance, young campaign managers must be versed in tasks such as writing a blog and analyzing a social networking initiative, rather than just planning traditional stump speeches and campaign rallies.

This gap between employers' expectations and students' skills is demonstrated by disparities in perceptions of students' readiness to enter the workforce. In a recent study, when students were asked if they felt digitally prepared for work, 44 percent responded that they felt "well-prepared" or "very prepared." In contrast, only 18 percent of surveyed employers responded that students are prepared for entry-level positions. ¹ Additionally, employers often find digital tools more valuable than traditional tools in evaluating job applicants. In a Hart Research Associates study, employers found electronic portfolios significantly more useful than a college transcript in assessing whether students had the skills necessary to fill a position: 80 percent of employers found electronic portfolios fairly or very useful, but only 45 percent of employers found traditional college transcripts helpful. ²

We have heard the same feedback about the value of digital skills to graduates directly from some major corporations. Jaime Casap, Google's Chief Educational Evangelist, told us: "Digital citizenship is the minimum requirement for the new economy. We need strong digital leaders!" Victor Montgomery, State Farm Business Analyst in charge of local recruitment in Atlanta, stated: "Digital literacy bridges the opportunity divide for students. With that in mind, we are looking for students that display initiative, innovation, and creativity while transforming the communities they live in." ³

The need for students to learn digital literacy skills should not be surprising, given that this generation of students has known technology only from a consumer perspective. Whereas older technologists first experienced technology in the workplace and then found ways to merge technology into their personal lives, the current generation of students first experienced technology as a means of entertainment and social communication. Despite having grown up with access to an increasing amount of technology, students now need to learn how to use technology to solve problems in academic and professional settings. Historically, we in higher education have not readied students for this transition, even though students are increasingly asked to use technology in their learning experiences. Many students enter college having already used technology to complete academic assignments: 75 percent of high school students have accessed class information through an online portal, 52 percent have taken tests online, and 37 percent have used online textbooks. ⁴

Learning to write, learning to think, and-these days-learning to form computational structures and to think digitally are requisites not only for employment but also for intellectual independence. Traditionally, the liberal arts have been about learning to think logically and to express ideas. The "liberal" in the liberal arts is about freedom. Some people have argued that widespread literacy (understood as reading at an eighth-grade level) was about making sure factory workers could read manuals well enough to keep machines running, rather than about providing for an informed citizenry. The equivalent for digital literacy would be to define it simply as being able to learn software quickly. Instead, digital literacy should be defined as knowing the effective practices suited to the dominant media. We should not teach students just the skills that will prepare them to follow instructions or quickly comprehend a user interface; instead we should aim to help students develop the expertise that will allow them to combine and create technologies to develop new and dynamic solutions. Just as traditional literacy and the liberal arts have been the key to independence since the advent of public schooling, digital literacy today is about intellectual freedom (see figure 1).

Many early digital literacy efforts in higher education focused on providing a single class that covered base-level skills, such as creating a PowerPoint presentation or spreadsheet. But what is truly needed in higher education today is integration of digital literacy throughout the curriculum, so that students are able to do the following:

1. Find and vet information online. In the digital world, being able to not only find information online but also determine its quality and validity is crucial.

2. See problems from digital perspectives. Students need to be able to analyze a problem and determine how to use digital tools to solve it. For example, can a problem be solved more quickly by creating a spreadsheet or by working the problem manually?

3. Become self-directed learners. The Internet has put all of the world's knowledge at our fingertips. Students should know how to take advantage of that availability of information to become lifelong learners.

4. Obtain digital solutions. Technology is constantly changing. Students must learn how to evaluate and buy the right digital tools to solve the problem at hand, rather than just relying on the tools they have used in the past.

5. Learn software quickly. Software is also always changing and improving, so students need to be able to quickly teach themselves new tools. For example, whereas being an expert in spreadsheets was an important quantitative skill set in the past, now it is increasingly important to be an expert in visualization tools such as Tableau.

6. Design and create digital solutions. Ultimately students should build a skill set that allows them to develop or customize their own digital tools. This does not necessarily mean that students need to be able to write their own applications from scratch. Rather, they should be comfortable customizing and combining tools to create a complete solution-for example, creating a web-form to automate the collection of customer evaluations and then outputting the results to a spreadsheet for analysis.

To understand the fundamental impact that digital literacy can have, we can look to history. Whenever the dominant medium of communication changes, controversy follows. When oral communication was replaced by written literacy as the main means of recording and transferring knowledge-a transformation that took place over decades and at different rates in different places-Socrates was recorded to have complained: "No written discourse, whether in meter or in prose, deserves to be treated very seriously." ⁵ Socrates was concerned that transitioning from oral communication to written literacy would degrade people's intellect. If people learned by reading books, rather than by debating with their elders, they would replace a real education with a superficial likeness of one. They would have the appearance of learning because they could talk about all the things they had read, but they would be unable to think for themselves or even know they needed to, having become accustomed to simply looking things up in books and accepting what they read.

From today's perspective, Socrates' rejection of literacy seems irrational, yet echoes of the same argument are raised about information being found by searching the Internet rather than by combing through printed source materials. As we transition again, this time from written literacy to digital literacy, the fears that Socrates voiced are resurfacing. We know the transition will be profound and we can't yet anticipate the consequences, so it's reasonable to be concerned. Resistance, however, is as futile now as it was in Socrates' day.

Designing Courses to Encourage Intellectual Independence

To address the value of digital experiences in providing a strong foundation for success, Georgia State University has launched a Digital Literacy Initiative. ⁶ In the first phase of this initiative, we are incorporating digital literacy skills into our 2015-2016 Honors College freshman curriculum. This pilot program has worked with faculty who teach core courses, ranging from composition to calculus, to build digital literacy skills into their classes. In addition, the pilot provides students with a set of personalized learning tools that include lightweight personal computing devices, online portfolio-development tools, open-source electronic texts, and learning materials that interactively adapt to meet the learning needs of individual students.

An example of what can be done if we embrace digital literacy is how we have rethought and redesigned the Honors English Composition course. The course examines how learning the art of rhetoric can introduce students to writing for the digital age. The course curriculum asks students to consider "the full stack"-not just the surface but also how the back end works. We are adding coding to reading and writing. The goal is to teach students how to think in digital ways in order to make informed technological decisions and even, in some cases, to develop their own technology as they gain intellectual independence.

What do we mean by intellectual independence in this context? Understanding publication options in today's digital environment is one example. An important goal for academics is to publish the results of their research in journals. Academics very often offer this work free of charge in order to reach a community of peers. Academic journals are typically published by a small, overworked, and largely volunteer staff. They survive on donations and departmental and college subsidies, generally selling the rights to the results of their labor to distribution houses. The distribution houses then sell the work back to the institutions and individuals who produced the work for free to begin with. In the digital age, when journals are distributed electronically and when resources for professional printing are no longer needed, the distribution houses add little or no value. Slowly, libraries and journals are starting to break free of this model. In November 2015, for instance, the editors and editorial board members of Lingua, a linguistics journal, resigned. ⁷ They then established , a new open-source linguistics journal. Given that the prestige of a journal is determined by the rigor of its peer-review process, a value added entirely by the academics working and networking among themselves, the primary reason for remaining indentured to distribution houses is lack of technical knowledge on the part of those running the journals. If the graduate students of today learn how to select and build their own content-management systems and digital networking tools, they can control production and distribution. They will then be free to create their own value and to share (or sell) that value as they see fit.

Digital literacy isn't just about economic freedom, however. Digital literacy enables forms of thinking that are not as readily enabled by traditional literacy. Without these forms of thinking and communicating, people are at a social and economic disadvantage. They are unable to think outside of the software they have memorized or to express themselves beyond the no-longer-relevant constraints of the printed page.

This is why learning to code is invaluable. Even at a basic level, coding helps a person develop critical thinking skills. In a deterministic system, like that of a computer, a single input leads to a single output: cause leads to effect. If you don't understand how something works, you can change one element and carefully observe the result. In addition, diagnostic thinking, which is critical thinking in deterministic settings, is an iterative process of hypothesize, test, refine, repeat. Given enough iterations, patience, focus, and discipline (changing only one variable at a time), a coder can start to build a mental model that solves a mystery or illuminates the black box behind how a system works.

People who think diagnostically don't do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results each time. They don't jump to unwarranted opinions. They learn to test their beliefs and uncover their assumptions. In a computer coding setting, students can practice diagnostic thinking in a fail-fast way. Transference of these skills to more complex, real-world systems isn't guaranteed, of course, and most real-world problems aren't without some element of randomness. But given how common digital tools are, knowing how to diagnose and troubleshoot problems is a valuable skill on its own, and the practice offered is a great foundation for increasing a learner's digital literacy.

First Steps toward a Different Kind of Literacy

Nontechnical people tend to resist the idea of writing code, but we have found that some relatively simple pieces of code can interest people who are more excited by ideas than technicalities.

For example, many people of a certain generation are accustomed to reading the same newspaper every day. They like their news from "trusted sources." The digital, they feel, can't be trusted. But an emerging model of receiving news is through mobile apps such as Flipboard. These apps ask us what we want to see and then provide relevant stories, with results that are constantly refined and that are based on what we interact with and what we say we like. The goal of these apps is to make us happy, and their assumption is that our happiness is reflected in our "liking" what we read. So, our tool for acquiring information helps reaffirm our biases. We aren't being informed so much as we are being further convinced of our own current thinking. It's our passivity in the process, and our ignorance of code, that helps ill-inform us.

Telling nontechnical people that Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) could liberate them from decisions made by their apps would likely cause their eyes to glaze over. RSS? XML? Alphabet soup. But if instead you give them a bit of code to copy-and-paste, code that requires very minimal modification to change what it displays, you may be able to push them gently toward liberation. For example:

<?
print "<a href=' https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=rss%20feeds'>Search for more rss feeds</a><br>";
$html = "";
//change url below to an rss feed of your choice.
$url = " http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1032";
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url); for($i = 0;
$i < 1; $i++){ $title = $xml->channel->item[$i]->title; // change < 1 to 5 for 5 articles instead of 1
$link = $xml->channel->item[$i]->link;
$description = $xml->channel->item[$i]->description;
$pubDate = $xml->channel->item[$i]->pubDate;
$html .= "<a href='$link'><h3>$title</h3></a>";
$html .= "$description";
$html .= "<br />$pubDate<hr />";
}
echo $html;
?>

Although symbols such as the greater than, less than, and dollar sign in this sample script can at first be a little confusing, most people are comfortable enough with the idea of a URL and with copying-and-pasting that they can quickly figure out how to make this example show something other than the NPR feed it refers to. The more adventurous will pretty quickly figure out how to get the code to show more than a single news story. At this level, they are just learning to read code, but doing so is an important step in the digital transformation. They aren't afraid, and they aren't content with letting others do the work entirely for them.

Economy of Language and Code

Another example moves the new coder from reading to writing-or at least to modifying with more complexity. It also directly demonstrates that the values of digital literacy are entirely compatible with the values of traditional written literacy. New coders generally learn relatively early in the process to follow an "if, then" branching statement. If "a=value," then do the following. When they combine "if, then" statements, ever-lengthening code can allow for more complex combinations. For instance, consider the code for a slot machine. If "a=lemon" and "b=cherry" and "c=orange," then print that the user has lost because the values don't match, and so on for every possible winning and losing combination of a, b, and c. Brutal. A simple "while" loop can do that same computing with much less code. A "while" loop more concisely says: continue automatically changing the values of a, b, and c until all three values match; when that happens print that the user won, otherwise print that the user lost.

The goal of understanding how to make code more efficient requires learning how to execute a loop. This might seem confusing at first for those with no programming experience, but with a bit of effort, and a few instructional hints, most people will get there pretty quickly. The game-like emersion of hitting refresh and seeing nothing change, with the promise that when the learner gets the code right, the slot machine will spin, keeps most people focused on the task until the code works more efficiently.

This looping code can be used for more than just spinning fruit images on a slot machine. A coder could use images of food groups, for example, to create a game that randomly generates a recipe out of three lists of ingredients. Or a coder could create a list of pants, shirts, and accessories and then have the machine randomly generate outfits. With a little basic CSS and the right images, the coder could even have the machine put the outfit together as if on a person. None of this requires sophisticated coding or thinking. But it does require a kind of thinking that most humanities majors don't realize they can do because they are focused on static content-on cutting words for economy of language rather than code.

This example underscores the fact that economy of effort is a shared virtue. Whereas economy of code creates faster applications, economy of prose creates faster comprehension for the reader. If a writer can get an insight across by saying something unexpected but immediately understandable, the writer can generate delight and admiration. Most great writers, and all memorable writers, have many of these flashes of simple brilliance to offer. Consider Mark Twain's statement: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter-'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning." ⁸

One important intellectual transformation that shifting from traditional written literacy to digital literacy requires is recognizing the difference between dynamic and static content. A key element is automation. Something printed remains as it was forever, until it fades away. In a digital environment, by contrast, the writer can have words come and go in response to events, such as the passing of a certain date. The basic thought pattern is "if event," then print. Added to that might be a time limit: after event + X time, unprint. Some high-profile misprints of celebrity deaths have made it obvious that obituaries are written long before a celebrity dies. These days, just about the only thing that gets written on the fly is weather reports and sports scores. Everything else is written in advance and saved in a content management system for when its moment arrives. Students in our example composition course learn to understand this principle with a very simple PHP date function that allows them to release information for web publication when a certain date, such as Valentine's Day, arrives.

$valentines = date('m d');
if($valentines == '2 14'){
include ("origin_of_valentines_day.php");
}

This may be trivial as code, but it is useful as an inducement to digital thinking and writing. What anticipated event should trigger what message? The piece can be written over time and presented as a carefully crafted finished product when the appropriate moment triggers the machine to print it.

These few lines of readable code are enough to encourage writers to see code as adaptable, learnable, and even kind of interesting-or at least a fun challenge. ⁹ Having come that far, students will soon start thinking about what things code can do that words on paper cannot.

Learning Digitally

Beyond the basic utility of knowing a bit about digital ways of thinking and communicating, learning to code provides students with another critically important learning opportunity. Because coding languages evolve and because there are many ways to do more or less the same thing, students have to learn how to learn online and how to teach themselves to become at least minimally capable with code. This means finding tutorials, breaking down complex problems into parts, seeking alternatives, and engaging with a community of like-minded learners. Being able to teach yourself is far more important than being learned because what we need to know changes constantly, what we know today may be useless five years from now, and what we know now may even get in the way of learning if we aren't flexible.

The days of specialization among professionals and businesspeople are long gone. If you can't do a great many different things, and a few of them at once, you will be unable to compete successfully. If you wanted to drive a taxi five years ago, you secured a class E license, and someone else took care of the car maintenance and insurance. All you had to do was drive. Today the "gig economy," which empowers workers to shift jobs throughout their career, has changed all that. Now you are on the hook for all aspects of the business. You are the business, if not the profit center. The specialist is dead. Long live the entrepreneur. As a result, the entire definition of what it takes to be literate has changed.

Technology allows educators and students to more easily reach audiences outside of the college or university, to employ a variety of media in communication, to create simulations, and to access a host of other tools that would not have been as available before the rise of computing. The Digital Literacy Initiative that we are undertaking at Georgia State University challenges faculty members across core disciplines-including English, history, math, science, and art-to ask: "What is digital literacy?" They are considering this question within their own subject areas and creating assignments that allow their students to apply these skills to real-life situations so that the students can demonstrate to future employers an ability to solve problems using the full range of available tools.

Students constantly ask how to discover their best career options. Our answer? Focus on developing skills such as computational thinking, team building, adaptive communication skills, and algorithmic design-all key elements of digital literacy. Both the 21st-century economy and the careers needed to fuel it are changing at an unprecedented rate. Constant business process disruptions, powered by technology, are challenging companies to find employees with the skills needed to navigate the future. Students must be prepared for nonlinear careers, pivoting to match the ever-changing work landscape. At the end of the day, digital literacy is about solving the problems facing today's world. By incorporating digital literacy across core subjects, colleges and universities will prepare their students to live at the intersection of humanity and technology.

Notes

1. Internships.com, "New Skills Gap Survey Reveals Increasing Student Demand for Digital Skills, Employer Appetite for Tech Savvy Hires," press release, July 16, 2014.

2. Hart Research Associates, Falling Short? College Learning and Career Success (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2015), p. 13.

3. Jaime Casap, personal communication with the authors, October 8, 2015; Victor Montgomery, personal communication with the authors, October 2, 2015.

4. Project Tomorrow and Speak Up, "The New Digital Learning Playbook: Understanding the Spectrum of Students' Activities and Aspirations, 2014," p. 3.

5. For more information, see the Honors Digital Literacy Initiative webpage. We will be rolling the initiative out to additional colleges beginning in the fall of 2016.

6. Scott Jaschik, "Language of Protest," Inside Higher Ed, November 2, 2015.

7. Mark Twain, letter to George Bainton, October 15, 1888, in George Bainton, The Art of Authorship: Literary Reminiscences, Methods of Work, and Advice to Young Beginners, Personally Contributed by Leading Authors of the Day (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890), 87-88.

8. For more code examples, see George Pullman, Writing Online: Rhetoric for the Digital Age (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 2016).

Phil Ventimiglia is Georgia State University's first Chief Innovation Officer. In this role, Phil is helping to shape the university's exploration of new ideas for teaching and learning. George Pullman is a Georgia State University faculty member, jointly appointed in the English and Communication Departments. He teaches rhetoric and writing from its classical origins to its digital present, as well as exploring effective online and instructional technology practices.

© 2016 Phil Ventimiglia and George Pullman

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 51, no. 2 (March/April 2016)

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from written to digital: the new literacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
From Written to Digital: The New Literacy

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Both the 21st-century economy and the careers needed to fuel it are changing at an unprecedented rate. Students must be prepared for nonlinear careers, pivoting to match the ever-changing work landscape. We thus need to rethink not just how we teach our students but what we teach our students.

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Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both

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Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both

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Attention: The ILA website and all online, email, and telephone member service functions will be down for a major technology upgrade on Monday, October 15, 2018. There may also be intermittent service a few days before or after this date. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We look forward to providing you with a significantly improved web and member experience as soon as we have completed our upgrade. Thank you.

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Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both

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Attention: The ILA website and all online, email, and telephone member service functions will be down for a major technology upgrade on Monday, October 15, 2018. There may also be intermittent service a few days before or after this date. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

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https://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards-for-teachers

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The ISTE Educator Standards challenge educators to deepen their practice, empower students and rethink traditional approaches to education.

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The ISTE Student Standards guide educators toward student-driven learning practices that prepare students to thrive in an evolving technological landscape.

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1. Choose a topic and discuss. (Scroll to the right to see all of them.) Here are some things you may choose to discuss: what you know about the topic, resources (ones you know about, use, or find in our time together), application + steps, successes/challenges, questions you have.

2. Share - We will share in our discussion, but you can also share on this Padlet board! Click on the + sign below a column to add a note. Click on the ... sign to see the variety of ways you can share.

3. Anytime during or after, feel free to share your take-aways, aha's or questions in the column at the far right.

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technological pedagogical and content knowledge  tpack tpck

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Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge

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Enhance, Extend, Engage

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What is the Triple E?
The Triple E is a practical framework that measures the degree to which the technology in a lesson is helping students meet the learning goals. Unlike other technology frameworks, the Triple E Framework focus is on the learning goals, and not specific technology tools. The framework draws on educational research concerning effective and ineffective practices with technology tools from the past two decades. The Triple E measurement tool was developed specially for K-12 teachers and administrators to use in lesson plan development, evaluation of the potential effectiveness of educational apps in learning, and evaluation of the potential effectiveness of tech tools in lesson plans. The framework is based on three components: Engagement in learning goals, Enhancement of learning goals, and Extension of learning goals. While these terms are often used interchangeably, they are distinct and different. The Triple E Framework defines each component shares what makes each piece unique. While not a perfect science, the Triple E measurement tool provides a benchmark for what educators should be thinking about when considering a technology tool for learning.

The Triple E Framework draws on a considerable amount of research about what works and does not work when it comes to technology in learning. In particular it emphasizes the following as its theoretical foundation...

Pragmatism: Active, social, creative, and authentic learning (Dewey, 1897)

Focus on the learning goals (Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2003)

Meaningful use of technology in the classroom requires teachers to integrate technological affordances with pedagogical approaches for the specific subject matter to be taught (Mishra & Khoeler, 2006).

The significance of instructional strategies in cooperation with using technology tools (Pane et al., 2017; Montrieux et al., 2015; Okojie et al., 2006)

The importance of time-on-task active engagement (Wartella, 2015)

Co-use and Joint-Media Engagement with technology devices and software (The American Academy of Pediatrics, 2013; Darling-Hammond et al., 2014; Zack & Barr, 2016)

Social aspect of learning through technology tools (Vaala et al., 2015; Guernsey, 2012)

Value-added strategies such as promoting student self-reflection, self-assessment, and self-explanation (Means et al. 2009)

The type of use--avoiding "drill and practice" which can have negative effects on learning outcomes and integrating more real world problem-solving and creating (Vaala et al., 2015)

The quality of technology use rather than quantity (Wenglinsky, 2006; Wenglinsky, 2008)

Technology itself does not lead to positive effects in student learning but can be an 'intellectual and social amplifier' which can help make good schools better but also can increase problems at less successful schools when not implemented strategically. (Warschauer, 2006)

Helping students connect existing knowledge with new knowledge (Wartella, 2015)

Knowledge needs to be situated in authentic contexts (Brown, Collins, and Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1990)

Read more about the research and links here

The Development of the Triple E
The Triple E Framework, developed in 2011 by Professor Liz Kolb at the University of Michigan, School of Education, was created to address the desire for K-12 educators to bridge research on education technologies and teaching practice in the classroom. There are decades of reliable and useful research that provides guidelines on effective practices when using technology tools for eliciting learning growth. The research clearly points out that effective technology integration begins with good instructional strategies and not fancy tools. The Triple E Framework was designed for educators to easily evaluate how to select tools to meet their learning goals, and ultimate design learning experiences so the tools have a positive impact on student achievement and learning outcomes. The Triple E Framework is meant to be used as a coaching tool to support teachers in their instructional choices around and with technology tools.

is the Triple E Valid and Reliable?
​Yes! A recent independent mix-methods study conducted in 2018, published in 2019 by Dr. Shelia Schatzke at the University of North Texas. found the Triple E to be both valid and reliable.
​
WHY Triple E?
The research on technology and learning over the past decade is fairly clear, technology should be integrated based on what we already know about good teaching and pedagogical practices. Dating back to the late 19th century, the foundation of current teaching practices is based on the work of pragmatism. Pragmatists like John Dewey (1897) pushed for learning to be embedded in the student's authentic everyday lives, socially constructed knowledge, active/hands-on learning and full of choice. Since the early 1990s Research has found that educational technology with a "drill and practice" approach often has no effects on learning or cognition. Yet, most technology tools created for education are still drill and practice and in the lower-order of Blooms Taxonomy.

Despite media often claiming a new piece of technology will "revolutionize" learning, that is almost never the case. The Triple E framework takes this fallacy of technology as the magic bullet learning into account, and allows teachers to become critical consumers of making mindful choices around technology tools in their teaching. It is a simple framework, based on research around teaching and learning practices with technology tools. The framework is intended to help educators create lessons that allow students to use technology to meet and add value to learning goals as active, social, creative learners, in authentic ways. The framework also helps K-12 administrators evaluate the connection between potential learning outcomes and the technology they are seeing in their teacher's classrooms.

How Triple E is Different than other Tech Integration Models
Some educators tend to be haphazard with technology tools, often trying new hardware or software because it's shiny or new, dismissing older technologies with an assumption that older=poor technology use. Today, few educators would argue that technology is a TOOL to help students reach learning goals. How do educators measure a tools ability to help students reach learning goals? There are a number of frameworks that teachers use for integrating technology (SAMR, ADDIE, TIM, TPACK, RAT), while all of them have benefits, none directly focus on how technology helps students achieve learning goals. While TPACK, developed by Mishra & Khoeler (2006)--technology knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge is the heart of integration, it is a conceptual framework and just needs a practical tool to help teachers envision what it may look like in practice. The Triple E is that practical tool that brings together instructional strategies, learning goals and purposeful tool selection. Most frameworks focus on how technology substitutes for traditional tools or if the technology use is creative, but not if the tools were able to actually leverage the learning goals. As the U.S. has become focused on standardizing learning and outcomes, making sure that students are using their time to meet learning goals is even more vital when integrating technology. This is where the Triple E Framework can help to extend the current models.

Significance of Instructional Strategies
No digital tool is a magic bullet for learning. While some tools have effective learning strategies built into them (eg...collaboration, differentiated instruction...etc), many do not. Even when a tool includes good pedagogical practices, teachers supports and instructional strategies around the tool are still a vital component to the lesson plan (Okojie et al., 2006). The type of tool selected is not nearly as significant as the instructional strategies a teacher creates when using the tools. Instead of tossing out effective teaching strategies when using technology tools, teachers who use technology effectively are able to integrate instructional moves to leverage better learning with the digital tools. The Triple E Framework makes certain to consider that while a tool may be "drill and practice", the teacher can create structures around the tool to help meet the three different components of the framework. For example, a teacher could pair students up while working on a piece of software (co-use), or students could participate in reflective thinking practices such as making predictions while they are using the technology tools, so they can reflect upon their learning. This is one reason why the framework is not built around using a certain type of tool for learning, rather it is built around making sure students are on-task and meeting their learning goals through the technology tools. ​
See examples of instructional strategies here

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The UN'Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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The UN'Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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These are worth exploring along with the World's Largest Lesson!
http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals.html

http://worldslargestlesson.globalgoals.org/

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Alan November and November Learning are great resources for many things. He explores the question - Who Owns the Learning? and encourages digital learning in real world contexts that impact the world.

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Discover a treasure of Educational Resources for Educators

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Our educational resources for educators provides powerful, practical ideas that inspire change and motivate learning. Free podcast, handouts, videos and more!

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An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy

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An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy

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Book Information

Book Description

Too many approaches to teaching with technology are instrumental at best, devoid of heart and soul at worst. The role of the teacher is made impersonal and mechanistic by a desire for learning to be efficient and standardized. Solutionist approaches like the learning management system, the rubric, quality assurance, all but remove the will of the teacher to be compassionate, curious, and to be a learner alongside their students.

As the authors write in their introduction: "It is urgent that we have teachers. In a political climate increasingly defined by obstinacy, lack of criticality, and deflection of fact and care; in a society still divided across lines of race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and privilege; in a digital culture shaped by algorithms that neither know nor accurately portray truth, teaching has an important ( urgent) role to play."

This collection of essays explores the authors' work in, inquiry into, and critique of online learning, educational technology, and the trends, techniques, hopes, fears, and possibilities of digital pedagogy. The ideas of this volume span almost two decades of pedagogical thinking, practice, outreach, community development, and activism.

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An Urgency of Teachers - Simple Book Production

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Too many approaches to teaching with technology are instrumental at best, devoid of heart and soul at worst. The role of the teacher is made impersonal and mechanistic by a desire for learning to be efficient and standardized.

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Video made by Cheridy's daughter 3rd grade

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Video made by Cheridy's daughter 3rd grade

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Learning Technology with Language Learners by Cheridy

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Learning Technology with Language Learners by Cheridy

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https://www.facebook.com/groups/techd.out.learning/

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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Are Digital Literacies Generic or Context-specific? by Maha Bali

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Are Digital Literacies Generic or Context-specific? by Maha Bali

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I was recently asked by Sally Pewhairangi whether I thought digital literacies could be taught as generic skills, out of any particular context, and whether they would then transfer. When I was asked this question, examples of cooking and learning languages were offered (citing chef Tim Ferris). For example, could we learn the rules of cooking, then apply them to different ingredients and cuisines? Does "content" matter that much?

There are three broad dimensions in my answer to this with respect to digital literacies being generic vs. context-specific:

1. Cognitive skills aren't like physical skills, but share common characteristics;

2. What we know about transfer of learning in general; and

3. In what ways are digital literacies generic/abstract and in what ways contextual?

My Ph.D. research was on critical thinking, so generic vs. context-specificity of cognitive skills is a question I grappled with for seven years!

A. Cognitive skills aren't like physical skills.
Driving/cooking are probably much simpler cognitively than critical thinking and digital literacies. Language, to me, is a mystery because I haven't studied it but, I know there's loads of literature out there, and we know in general that kids learn language differently from adults and that people can learn a language by immersion rather than by any direct instruction in grammar or anything. It's interesting that the term literacies is used with reference to language acquisition, and we use it in digital literacies. One common aspect of literacies which also came up in earlier conversations with Sally, was my belief that digital literacies could only be (really) learned socially, as with language. Doug Belshaw has made a similar point about literacies in general and digital literacies in specific.

In general, for cognitive skills, I believe it is possible to learn them via direct instruction, but I don't think that's necessarily the best pedagogical approach compared to immersion in context, with reflection. Which feeds into my next point.

B. What we know about transfer of learning in general.
I read, during my Ph.D. pursuit, that we learn to transfer best when we learn something in context, then learn to abstract and recontextualize in another context (see Perkins and Salomon and Bransford et al). So, while you could learn to drive a car, you can transfer some of that learning to driving a truck, adding some small differences; I assume the differences are much larger if you plan to drive an airplane or rocket. Similarly, with critical thinking, you learn it more fully in a particular context, and if you're able to abstract some of it, you can recontextualize. For example: what counts as valid research differs from one discipline to another and, so, your critical thinking when reading research for a discipline different from your own won't be 100 percent, but you can learn it more easily if you know something about evaluating research in another field, as opposed to if you didn't know anything at all. Learning it out of context can be useful, but applying it to a specific context would require effort and specific knowledge of that context. I think digital literacies are similar. For example, you can learn to be digitally literate in how you use Twitter and Flickr, then transfer most of that to Instagram (as a form of social media that is visual) but it's unlikely that any digital literacies you develop while working inside an LMS (Learning Management System) like Blackboard would benefit you when you want to blog on the open web.

C. In what ways are digital literacies generic/abstract and in what ways contextual?
This is the most complicated question to answer but, I am giving it a shot. So many contextual dimensions here. There's the tool. There's the culture of people you are interacting with on the tool. There's the thing you are trying to do with the tool. Each of these nuances are important and I don't think you can abstract the literacies involved if you learned them out of context. It would be like someone wrote in a Hypothes.is annotation of one of my articles, like learning traffic rules without sitting in a car: it wouldn't prepare you to drive). So, for example, the skill (both technical and social) to facilitate an online conversation on Google hangouts is transferrable to different tools like Zoom or Skype. The skill to facilitate an intercultural conversation is transferable across similar cross-cultural groups and less so outside them. For me, Arab-Anglo is my personal expertise as a cultural hybrid. I wouldn't know what to do with a German-Chinese group, for example. I could try, and might do better than a monocultural person, but not much. Compare that to my familiarity with UK/US culture, which makes it possible for me to dialogue with Australian/Canadian groups even though I have less direct experience with them. So, for example, in digital literacies, learning to think critically about identity, privacy, communication and advocacy in one social media tool (e.g. Twitter) may transfer well to another (e.g. Facebook). Use of Twitter for activism during Arab Spring and for #BlackLivesMatter may have similarities. None of these, though, directly improve one's ability to produce complex multimedia with a specific message, as that's a different literacy. You can combine them, of course, because that activist art/multimedia can support a Twitter campaign, but they're also separable to an extent.

How do you teach/learn digital literacies? How much of this learning do you think is contextual and how much generic? Tell us in the comments below.
Note: I'm usually shy about writing about digital literacies on DML Central because the digital literacies guru, Doug Belshaw, writes here. The article on digital literacies I am known for is an introductory piece and actually references his work heavily. The other article about digital literacies I co-authored caused a stir, but it still didn't make me feel like an expert on the topic. But, I wrote this post thanks to Sally Pewhairangi, who recently asked me the above questions as an "expert" on digital literacies for an article she's writing. I feel I do have something to share here (thanks Sally for asking good questions and great follow-up questions, which led to this post - her follow-up question made me think, especially since I am teaching a course around digital literacies next semester inshallah). When I answered the questions, I told her it would make a good blog post, and she encouraged me to go ahead and do that. So here we are. Banner image: "Digital natives" photo by Juan Cristóbal Cobo, shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

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Are Digital Literacies Generic or Context-specific? - Connected Learning Alliance

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I was recently asked by Sally Pewhairangi whether I thought digital literacies could be taught as generic skills, out of any particular context, and whether they would then transfer. When I was asked this question, examples of cooking and learning languages were offered (citing chef Tim Ferris).

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Three Myths About Education Technology and the Points of Light Beyond

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Three Myths About Education Technology and the Points of Light Beyond

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The first is that technology has the capacity to disrupt systems. For all the hope and hype that technologies can enable major organizational changes in educational systems through personalization, unbundling, or information access, but in reality, the reality is that culture domesticates new technologies. New apps, software, and devices are put in the service of existing structures and systems, rather than rearranging them. The most widely adopted education technologies are those that add a little efficiency to existing practices in school systems.

The second myth is that free and open technologies will democratize education. One virtue of the incredibly rich data that can be collected from new digital platforms is that we can investigate more closely than ever before how learners from different life circumstances access and use new learning technologies. The research from these investigations is robust and clear: new technologies, even free ones, usually disproportionately benefit students with the financial, social, and technical capital to take advantage of new technologies. In a sense, the digital divide is more of a digital fault line, and each new innovation opens chasms of opportunity between our most and least affluent students.

The third myth is that digital divides can be closed through providing technology access. As complex and challenging as it is to create systems where every young person can use a functioning, modern computer with reliable broadband connection, these are only first steps toward digital parity. It turns out that social and cultural forms of exclusion are as powerful, and often much harder to understand and address, as challenges of technology access. Turning the incredible potential of education technology toward the benefit of the students who are furthest from opportunity will require reckoning with the social and cultural contexts in which disadvantaged students live.

The accumulated evidence that shatters these myths makes it clear that education technology will never simplistically close digital divides. No matter how many transistors we squeeze onto a millimeter, no matter how many bits are passing wirelessly over our heads, the hard parts of reducing educational inequality will remain hard.

But for all these challenges, there are education technologists who are partnering with educators, system leaders, developers, learners, and social and cultural researchers to better understand the truly difficult dimensions of the digital divide. From experiments in K-12, higher ed, informal spaces, and lifelong learning, there are a growing body of exemplary projects that are devising new theories and testing new practices for putting education technology in the service of learners furthest from opportunities. These diverse examples have two common themes. The first is that they attempt to close the social distance between the people creating new technologies and communities of learners. Technologists with a deep understanding of learners and their contexts are more likely to understand their needs and constraints. Second, projects that successfully close digital divides are sensitive to context and culture, and their solutions adapt to local conditions.

We live in the greatest time in world history to be a learner. For almost every conceivable topic, hobby, or discipline, there exists an online community of resources, teachers, and learners excited about sharing their passions and pursuits. Our challenge is to give all young people the skills, connections, and experience needed to take advantage of the wealth of opportunities that our unique era affords.

Today, we're publishing a new report: " From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies." The report lays out in greater detail the three ed tech myths above and connects them to research findings from diverse fields and disciplines. The report then outlines a variety of examples of programs that are closing dimensions of the digital divide, and lays out a framework toward developing a set of Guiding Principles for Digital Equity, that could guide developers, philanthropists, venture capitalists, policymakers, researchers, and educators toward more effective strategies for leveraging technology in the service of equality. The report concludes with a call for efforts to consolidate all that we have learned over the last decades about education technology and equality, and to imagine from that history a new way forward.

We hope you will read the report, share it widely, and connect with us here and on Twitter with your questions, reactions, and suggestions.

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Three Myths About Education Technology and the Points of Light Beyond - Connected Learning Alliance

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The first is that technology has the capacity to disrupt systems. For all the hope and hype that technologies can enable major organizational changes in educational systems through personalization, unbundling, or information access, but in reality, the reality is that culture domesticates new technologies.

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Ed Tech and Equity: An Interview with Justin Reich

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Ed Tech and Equity: An Interview with Justin Reich

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From time to time, I have featured here the work of Mimi Ito and others from the Connected Learning Research Network. Along with danah boyd, Mimi and I wrote Participatory Culture in a Networked Society and we've collaborated on a broad range of education-related ventures. So, when Mimi flags something to my attention, I listen and respond. Last October, Ito sent me the copy of From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies, a report she had written with Justin Reich, currently in the department of Writing and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Having featured Ito several times here, I wanted to put the spotlight on Reich, all the more so when I learned he was now teaching through the program I helped to establish at MIT.

What he has to say here gives some provocative glimpses into what these two researchers found, challenging the discourse of technological disruption and inevitability, which shaped so much early thinking about the ways new media would impact education. In a classic meeting between technology and culture, they find that the culture of schools, much more conservative than even many skeptics imagined, wins out most of the time, resulting in a world where lowered expectations and diminished resources for some youth keep them from enjoying the benefits imagined by those who introduce new media tools and platforms. But, what he shares here scratches the surface. There is no substitute for doing what Reich urges at one point: "Read the report!"
Your report identifies three core myths about technology and education. What are they? Each of these seems to boil down to a form of technological determinism. How do we help people to understand the social and cultural forces that shape our relations with technology?
To provoke people's thinking on edtech and equity, we argue that there are three myths out there that are worth rethinking

The first is that technology disrupts systems, when very often, culture domesticates technology. From Clayton Christensen on down, we have a whole mythology about the power of technology to reorganize human systems, but what we see over and over again is that schools and other learning ecologies are great at taking new technologies and putting them in service of existing goals and intentions. From slate to chalkboard to overhead projectors to document cameras to projectors to smartboards, we've had nearly a dozen display technologies in classrooms and overwhelming they are used to display notes that students are supposed to copy or summarize. I was at Google recently and someone involved in the Classroom team was explaining how they were so successful at scaling up so quickly, and the "secret" turned out to be helping the system do everything it was doing anyway. Generally speaking in schools, it's a good bet that if you introduce a new technology, it will be used to extend existing practices, and it won't be a catalyst for disruptive innovation.

The second myth is that open equals equitable, but more commonly, free technologies disproportionately benefit affluent folks with the financial, social, and technological capital to take advantage of free innovations. I've studied this in several contexts now, at the end of the 00s I was studying classroom uses of wikis, and found they were used more often and for more interesting purposes in affluent schools. In the last few years, I studied MOOCs, and found that U.S. residents lives in neighborhoods about a half of a standard deviation more affluent that typical Americans.

If you want to make a safe bet about any new tech in schools, bet that it will be used to extend existing practices, and most adoption and most of the interesting practices on the margins will happen in affluent schools or in the upper tracks of schools with more affluent kids.

The third myth is that we can close some of these digital divides through expanding technology access. In reality, social and cultural exclusions are much more difficult to overcome. This is an old lesson, but we understand it better with each passing year. I was first exposed to some of these ideas from the sociologist Paul Attewell's work on the two Digital Divides: the divide of access and the divide of usage. You can wire everyone up the same with the same devices, and young people from more affluent neighborhoods will have more opportunities to use tech for more creative and production-oriented uses with more support from adults and mentors. Henry, your own work on the Participation Gap -the gap between who has access to new technologies and who actually participation as producers in creative networks-is another source of inspiration for this kind of thinking.

One overarching lesson from all this is that if you want to build great edtech, you ought to have folks with social and cultural expertise on your team. The tech is just table stakes, it's really about the integration into the learning ecology.

I've been teaching undergrads at MIT this semester, and most of them are Computer Science concentrators. A big part of how startups encourage developers to think is to focus very closely on a particular and well-defined interaction: think of how Uber tries to create the experience of tapping your phone have having a black car come pick you up and whisk you away like a celebrity. Focusing on a particular interaction makes design tractable, but it also means you aren't paying attention to the large context and system.

It might be technological determinism, but even if it's not the result of strictly deterministic thinking-maybe just a kind of techno-optimism-we think there are real limitations to how much technology alone can shape systems.

As to your questions about how we help people understand more about how social and cultural forces shape tech, Mimi and I are starting a whole project related to this. Over the past year, we've had three meetings with folks from venture capital, philanthropy, and edtech trying to have a good old-fashioned consciousness raising conversation. I think the research on the challenges we face is pretty stable and robust at this point, and the more exciting work ahead is to figure out how we can learn from the exemplar projects out there that are doing great work to close opportunity gaps.
An underlying argument is that despite our high hopes and best intentions, "evidence is mounting that these new technologies tend to be used and accessed in unequal ways, and they may even exacerbate inequity." What are some of the indicators supporting this claim?
I mentioned two of my studies on this, about wikis and MOOCs. Let me describe for a minute some commonalities of both of these studies. First, these technology platforms operate at a global scale and collect massive amounts of data. There are many serious privacy concerns about this kind of data collection, but if you want to understand edtech and inequality, you need to gather enough data to understand how subgroups use technology indifferent ways. In both of these studies we connect log data from the platforms with national datasets about demographics-in the case of schools we use school level data from the National Center on Education Statistics and for the MOOC study we used data derived from the Census.

For the wiki study, we found publicly-viewable, education related wikis used in U.S., K-12 schools, and measured where they were created, how long they were used, and how rich and collaborative the learning experience was. We then gathered socio-economic status data about the schools themselves, so we could compare how wikis were used differently in school serving different populations. We found that wikis were more likely to be created in schools serving affluent kids, that wikis created in affluent schools were used longer and with more student involvement.

For the MOOC study, we had all of the data about HarvardX and MITx enrollments and course completions, and we had folks' addresses, which we could use to identify their census block group, a neighborhood of about 1200 individuals. If you know something about someone's neighborhood, you can make a good guess about their own level of affluence, There, we found that people who register for MOOCs live in neighborhoods about ½ standard deviation more affluent that typical Americans, and for young people who register, students from more affluent neighborhoods are more likely to complete courses.

There is lots of previous research on edtech and inequality, Paul Attewell did observational studies in homes and schools. Other researchers have used surveys; Harold Wenglinsky used NAEP surveys in the 90s to identify that Black and low-income students were more likely to use computers in math class for drill and practice than for more cognitively complex math work. For the methods nerds, the observational work had great validity, but problems with generalizability, and the surveys probably had low validity, but good generalizability. The virtue of some of the newer work examining whole systems is that it has high validity, since we can peer closely at exactly what people do, along with the generalizability that comes from massive, international platforms. But all this work points in the same direction- people with more financial, social, and technical capital have a greater ability to take advantage of new innovations, even free ones.
This is a rather dire finding for people who have spent the last few decades trying to bring new media platforms and practices into schools. I can imagine it was hard won. Has it force you to rethink some of your earlier work in this space?
Hard won, for sure: I started working on this is 2008, and 2017 was when I felt confident to get together with Mimi and say "Look, we know what's going to happen when the next piece of edtech comes out, and we have to start avoiding some of the same mistakes." Each little brick takes years to stack up on the foundation, but at this point we have thirty years of work with computers, and 100 years of work on signals technology going back to radio-we can make good bets about how edtech will affect equity when in context. .

I started my work in edtech in affluent private schools as a history teacher, and I thought teaching in 1-1 environments there was fabulous-16 kids, computers for everyone, batteries always charged, networks always working. When I started into research, I was pretty sure that the things that worked great for me in the world's best teaching environment weren't going to work other places. But that was the real start of the Web 2.0 era, and there were all kinds of calls that social media and peer production tools were going to democratize education, my instinct was that wasn't going to happen because even though the tools were "free", the infrastructure to make them valuable was very expensive. So I was right from the beginning.
What are some of the factors that result in this reproduction of unequal relations?
My favorite story about this comes from an observation in a school in rural New Hampshire. The teacher was preparing a lesson using wikis, and all the kids had laptops, the batteries were charged, the broadband was coming into the building, the internet was reaching the wireless access points and connecting to the computers, the projector had a bulb, and the introductory slides were all ready to go. The teacher went to plug in the projector, and the electrical outlet fell behind the dry wall, and the teacher needed to rethink everything. Getting technology working in schools requires the maintenance of a complex logistical infrastructure, that includes outlets, wires, wireless access, power, batteries, policy, and pedagogy. It takes a big investment in staffing to keep all that running, and it's easier for affluent schools to make those investments.

Mimi's student Matt Rafalow has some great research about how cultural perspectives at schools also reproduce structural inequalities. To oversimplify, when rich white kids play around with technology, they are treated as hackers, and when poor black and brown kids play around with technology, adults treat them as slackers. Adults can treat very similar behaviors differently based on the demographics of the students engaging in the behavior.

Maybe one other important point is that there are some sectors where introducing technology does lead to certain kinds of reducing of inequalities. I've seen data about agricultural prices in rural parts of southeast Asia where before cell phones, prices are very volatile, and after the widespread introduction of phones, prices stabilize dramatically. Or even something as basic as cameras, which were the provenance of the elite for many years, but recently have played a crucial role in documenting police violence and so forth. So I understand why people might have an intuition that free technologies would be particular good for people without a lot of resources, and certainly sometime they can be, but it's unusual in edtech for new technologies to disproportionately benefit low income students. When it happens, it happens because designers are very intentional about that as a goal.
Even when educational materials are free and open to all online, they tend to draw the most use from those who are already educational and informational haves. I can imagine frustrated designers and educators throwing up their hands and saying, What more can we do? What steps can we take to decrease or even reverse this process of inequality in educational opportunity? Do you have some good exemplars of what this better practice looks like?
So that's the second part of our paper: From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes. There is great work that's happening out there, and terrific researchers, developers, and funders and finding out all kinds of important strategies for making technology work for the students furthest from opportunity.

There are a number of great strategies that folks have identified. Ricarose Roque's Family Creative Learning and Boston's TechGoesHome both get families involved in learning more about tech so they can support their kids learning... if it takes a village to raise a child, then let's teach the village. The folks at OpenStax at Rice University realized that there were something like 20 college courses in the US that were responsible for over half of all enrollments in universities: Calculus I, U.S. History, etc. So they got donors to fund the development of really great open source textbooks books on these topics that they target at the community college market, where textbook costs are a substantial burden on student budgets. This seems to be a case where free things do the greatest benefit for the students furthest from opportunity.

In the paper, we offer four types of strategies to get people started. First, co-design with learners and communities. Make sure that your development teams include people and have close relationships with the learners you most want to serve. Second, align home, school, and community-get parents and families involved and build their capacity alongside students. Third, building on all the great work in the Connected Learning community, leverage the interests that students bring from their cultures and backgrounds. Fourth, measure the impact of new technologies on different kinds of learners, and really try to understand how innovations get picked up differently by different communities. There is much more in the paper we released about each of these strategies, but what they have in common is the call for people to think about the context of edtech, not just the tech.
What advice do you have for people trying to develop ed-tech for use in the current cultural and educational climate? What should they do differently if they want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem?
Here's one thought that I've been playing around with in teaching my undergraduates: one question that edtech developers and advocates might ask is: "What is the human-human interaction that you hope results from the technology that you are developing? Before, during or after an interaction with edtech, what kind of conversation will a kid have with an adult or with another kids because of the technology." That might be a simple way to get people to start thinking more about the broader context of edtech.

Read the report! I guess that's sort of a boring researcher answer, but we wrote the darn thing to help people find their first steps.

We think that step one is getting a handle on the basic findings of 30 years of research into education technology and equity. If you are working on a project that's trying to make education more equitable using tech, there is a long history to suggest that it's really hard to do that.

Step two is looking out there at the great examples out there, many of which we describe in the paper, that are finding creative and clever ways of partnering with learners and other stakeholders to build equitable edtech.
What are the next steps for you and the other researchers on this team?
Step three is getting your team together and saying, "OK, we haven't done as well as we wanted to as a field on this over the last 30 years. From our own vantage, what could we be doing in the next 30 days or 30 years to make some improvements." This New Gilded Age that we are in is a very difficult place to finds ways of connecting innovation and equity, but the challenge that we face shouldn't dim our hopes. Education is a great place for people who maintain hope in the face of structural adversity.

Mimi and I have some schemes that we're working on. We'd like to continue to find ways of engaging the venture capital, philanthropic, developer, researcher, and practitioner communities around this. There aren't that many people in the US who are gatekeepers to what kinds of edtech projects get started and what gets adopted. If we could educate and engage a good portion of those folks, I think we could start a new conversation across many different actors in the field.

While we have some good early exemplars of how to think about edtech and equity in sophisticated ways, there is much, much more work to be done. We're hoping to find a way to have the technology industry come together to fund some of that research collaboratively, so it's not just something coming out of one foundation or one research lab, but it's something that the edtech industry takes on itself to better figure out how to serve all kids, especially those who need us most.

Justin Reich is an educational researcher interested in the future of learning in a networked world. He is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an instructor in the Scheller Teacher Education Program, a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. The Teaching Systems Lab investigates the complex, technology-rich classrooms of the future and the systems that we need to help educators thrive in those settings.

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Ed Tech and Equity: An Interview with Justin Reich

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From time to time, I have featured here the work of Mimi Ito and others from the Connected Learning Research Network. Along with danah boyd, Mimi and I wrote Participatory Culture in a Networked Society and we've collaborated on a broad range of education-related ventures. So, when Mimi flags s

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There are a growing number of online global collaborations that allow learners to explore real life social and environmental topics within a community. Learners can connect to community members...

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This is Cheridy's site: Suggested drop down menu: Toolbox

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In order to step outside the box, we must first explore what is in the box. Then, we have choices. Play! Create! Share! Reflect! Then outside b u.

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Digital Storytelling Cheridy's daughter 3rd grade

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Digital Storytelling Cheridy's daughter 3rd grade