August 2005 Newsletter

Volume 9 Issue 7  August 2005

Mid-Level Myopia

As human beings we suffer from a little-known condition we shall call “mid-level myopia” which, in lay terms, simply means our capacity to make microscopic and the macroscopic observations of particular phenomena .and then, assuming that because the microscopic and macroscopic perspectives seem plausible then everything in between must also be true.  This condition has been obvious in the discussion about technology and our young peoples’ interaction with it. 

The microscopic view is that we know of or might even know personally, individual young people who   appear to have the capacity to combine text messaging on their phones   with multiple MSN (or similar) instant messaging services on the computer, and interactive internet games with their friends   while simultaneously their ear-drums are being bombarded by 100 decibel music via their i-pod.

The macroscopic view is that on our way to work we observe that there appears to be many young people in this age range connected to an i-pod (or similar music device).  The assumption then becomes that all young people are not only just listening to music all the time but that they are also using instant messaging, texting each other via their cellphones, playing interactive multi-user games online, can build their own computers from a collection of household junk, are constantly challenging Bill Gates for worldwide software domination and in the process somehow pose a severe social threat to society as we see it.

 Our tendency to extrapolate the microscopic observations we make through to the macroscopic (or vice versa) and assign to everyone this collection of technological capabilities is natural enough but inherently inaccurate.  Generalisations are useful, but there is no doubt that there are huge exceptions to these generalisations and no one group of humanity constitutes a fully homogeneous set.  The classroom is more likely to represent a cross-section of individuals who may appear to act at times as a collective and homogeneous unit, but scratch below the surface and this is usually far from the case.

The following "day in the life" is a generalisation but it does provide us with some indicators as to the world inhabited by many of our young people today.  Even if the cap does not fit, most would feel a strong peer and marketing pressure to both aspire to this generalisation and to acquire the gadgetry and the skills set necessary to give them a feeling of belonging.  These social communication tools and the desire to acquire, or at least demonstrate the illusion that they have, wide popularity, has led to another Internet trend:

Several weeks ago I received my first invitation to log onto a web site (http://myspace.com/) , fill in some personal details and interests, then add my photograph in order to become someone's "friend".  At first this appeared somewhat “superficial”; collecting friends just as you would collect stamps, baseball cards or antiques.  However on reflection the process of collecting friends and thus demonstrating your popularity may just be an extension of a persons’ virtual life!  The depth of that friendship/relationship might be trite and trivial but a friend is a friend and people with lots of friends are obviously more popular and successful . . . . and the race is on to collect as many friends as you can.   After all, collect enough friends and you might appear on the cover of the latest "gossip" magazine; and this would be a fantastic coup; demonstrating to the world that you have lots of friends and are worth being a friend with or aspiring to be friends with. Does this mean all these people are innately insecure or is there a core human requirement to present a physical representation of a virtual life?

On reflection, these actions seem to indicate (to the amateur psychologist in every teacher) that our young people crave "social security", they want to be loved by somebody and they want to show others that other people love them and care for them in a world where technology can sometimes remove the closeness normally associated with friendship. Collecting friends on the Internet at least shows that you are a somebody in a world where it is very easy to be a nobody. But is there something more to this?

Has the concept of friendship among "wired" people mutated to a point where friendship is not just about the three of four people you meet up with at school/work every day, play sport with and engage in social chitchat but rather that friendship now extends beyond the boundaries of actually meeting up in person every day.  As a conference speaker and someone who exchanges information with thousands of people around the world I find myself working in two layers of friendship.  The first represents the people I interact with on a daily basis in the physical sense of being with them, talking, picking up the nuance of expression and social interchange, and the second is the group of people with whom I chat with using Skype (http://www.skype.com) , send e-mails to, instant message with and interact with in a predominantly electronic medium.  Both are valuable forms of friendship, they are just different. Friendship in the physical sense is usually cemented by a shared, emotional experience that is hard to replicate in a wired environment and maybe this is why it is necessary for groups to formalise their friendship by inviting them into a "friendship ring".  The invitation may constitute "a right of passage" where you become a formal friend of someone you may never have actually met. Time will tell whether this becomes an accepted social practice.

The following scenario highlights the amount of communication that transpires between young people who have the tools and the capabilities to function at high level in a wired community.

Sam wakes up to the sound of a top 40 ringtone melody from his mobile phone and quickly resets it to remind him to hand in his science assignment after his morning break.  Scanning the phone for missed calls and txts that came through during the night, Sam replies to several, sending to one of his classmates, Jenny, the URL he used last night that provided the background information he needed to complete the science assignment.  Jenny has only three hours before the assignment is due but she has already collated information from several classmates as well as from an excellent online text from the "Creative Commons"[1] web site sent by another classmate Paula the evening before.  The assignment was a reasonably low level job and would mostly take some synthesising of the content she had already researched, and then she would just need to add her own context to it.  All she had to do then was post it on to her online school intranet[2] by eleven o'clock and all would be fine.

Sam wanders down to the kitchen, turns on the computer screen while selecting a bowl and filling it with cereal and returning to the desk.  Last night Sam downloaded “Yahoo! Messenger with voice”[3] to replace both his MSN instant messaging service [4]and Skype[5] his computer telephone service.  An online poll amongst his classmates yesterday (on their school intranet) produced an overwhelming vote for integrating these two services using Yahoo.  While Skype provided cheap telephone connections, the new Yahoo service was absolutely free.  He would now have to txt his father and two cousins overseas to tell them to make the change also so they could continue their discussions.  Having gone through the setup process Sam posts his contact details to his classmates on their class intranet page.

Sam’s younger sister Nikki is already set up with the laptop and is simultaneously txting her friends, listening to music and finishing her mathematics homework worksheet.  With Dad away overseas and Mum not coming home until 6 pm the homework session had dissolved into a music search and chat session following her hockey training. Now is the time to catch up and quickly post the worksheet on her web site within the school intranet.

With the cereal almost finished Sam gets the txt back from Jenny pointing him to the new Coke music web site[6]  that provides legal music downloads. Sam already uses Free MP3 Music[7] but quite often he cannot get the latest tracks to upload to his Apple i-pod, and Coke are offering even cheaper songs than Apple i-tunes[8]. He quickly adds a note to himself using his reminder function in his cellphone[9] to check this out when he gets home from school after sports practice.  Cereal finished, he picks up his headset and hastily speaks in his final couple of paragraphs[10] for the speech he will be giving after the game on Saturday (two different speeches have to be written depending on whether they win or lose the final).  He quickly publishes his speech up to his school intranet sports section so his coach can check it and make any changes (unlikely!).  Sam casually glances over to his sister and informs her of the new music site but isn't too surprise to see her proudly pointing to the icon already embedded in the computers system tray. “Whatever!”  He condescendingly returns and gives her a quick pat on the head and asks her to sort out Mum’s e-mail which she has managed to lose the desktop icon for[j1] .

Sam races out the door while responding to several txt messages, and jumps on the bus for the 10 minute trip to school.  Ignoring most of the younger students on the bus Sam is listening avidly to the “album” he downloaded last night on to his i-pod shuffle[11] and casts a belittling glance at the younger student across the bus who has just tucked his shuffle into the pocket of his school shirt; “so uncool man!”, he mutters to himself.  Sending and receiving several txt messages he realises that he will need to be at the gym during lunchtime as the school basketball team has got a match with a neighbouring school. He didn't quite make the team this year, which is cool, but he is keen to capture a bit of video footage[12] on his cellphone to send it to his dad who is still overseas on business. 

Just before reaching school he receives an instant message from school reminding him that parents-teacher interviews are next week and that he would need to update his online Knowledge Log portfolio four days prior to the interview.  Sam's Knowledge Log is the self-assessment part of the e-portfolio that he completes every six weeks.  Sam's teachers, three of his peers and a mentor are able to make short comments on Sam's reflections on its own progress in each of his subjects.  Sam makes a mental note to use some of the recent comments he has made in his own personal blog[13] and cut and paste them into his Knowledge Journal (another element of Sam's school e-portfolio) which he can then use legitimately in his Knowledge Log.

Sam pockets his cellphone as he arrives at the school entrance, and then remembers that the “cell blackout” the school had put in place last week was over.  The school had declared a “no use of cellphones” policy for a week following a “cell bashing" in which a younger student had been tormented, with countless intimidating derogatory txts sent to his cellphone.  The culprits had been caught but the punishment from the school was tame in comparison to that of the school students who exacted their own justice on the culprits. Sam checks to see where his mates are hanging out and gets some instant humour in return and quickly guesses where they are.

8.50 am and classes begin, cellphones turned off for this class and the lesson begins with four students presenting a very comical news broadcast[14] parodying a local news broadcaster interviewing two conservation experts.  The students use the last period on Friday to develop their Microquest,[15] taking an hour to research, produce and edit their online script.  The use of PowerPoint and Word have been on the demise over the last 12 months as the students now predominantly use their web based intranet to deliver presentations in class via the multimedia projector, (which all classrooms had installed at the end of last year).  Having the Microquests[16] online along with the teachers reference notes means everyone can access the resources they needed from any internet enabled device.  Although some students carry a laptop most settle for more convenient PDA’s or smart cell phones.

Following some brief questioning by the rest of the class the four students proclaim their brilliance and return to their seats.  The teacher opens up the topic of globalisation by suggesting  a brainstorm on the electronic whiteboard highlighting some differences between the methods used by their parents to acquire information and knowledge about the world when they were the students’ age and those used by the students to carry out the same process today.  The team leaders for the day (two students each day take turns in being the class team leaders) race to the board in a mock scrap over who will initiate the brainstorm session. Paula takes control and within five minutes of asking for ideas the electronic whiteboard is full of notes and links and a .jpg image of the brainstorm has been saved and added to the subject page within the school intranet.

The teacher then encourages Paula and Jenny to facilitate the process of developing a fertile question[17] based around the perceived and real differences between two generations and world changes due to globalisation.  After 10 minutes of quite heated, sometimes random and almost always animated discussion, the  outcome is more of a statement than a question "Globalisation sucks man!" but the teacher lets it run and the students formulate some supporting questions which offer some direction to the study.  The teacher then points students to a collection of web sites that can be used for the study and, dividing the class into eight groups asks the groups to investigate the quality of each web site and to report their findings via their social science discussion group within their school intranet.

Meanwhile Nikki’s school is in the process of an upgrade that will finally see it fully cabled, with each of the classrooms wirelessly networked making the cables that dangled from the roof a thing of the past.  Nicky's school does not allow cellphones but they have instant messaging contact via a series of “kiosks” specially built for the purpose and sprinkled throughout the school.  She logs on and sends a quick message to three friends to meet her lunchtime on the hockey field.  Nikki is only nine and doesn't know a world within which she cannot chat with anyone, anywhere, any time.  She watches the music station on television along with a natural history program but doesn't have any time for much else on the box.  She arrives in the classroom to find the rest of the class listening to a podcast[18] of the latest shuttle landing  courtesy of  information e-mailed to the teacher by a colleague  the day before[19].

Once the video podcast has been completed the teacher introduces Anya and Aroha who present a microquest on the problems experienced by the shuttle crew when they docked at the space station.  While this is going on the teacher quietly uploads a collection of photographs[20] from the Morgue File[21] and the royalty free section of www.corbis.com/ [22]. Having placed the images in random order in the social science section of the class intranet page the teacher shows them to the students using the multimedia projector and directs instructs: "In groups of three to four students use the images in an imaginative way to tell the story of how the astronauts felt as they were heading back to earth, knowing that while their lives were in danger they had ,in the process become part of history and were in fact living their greatest adventure". The students are asked to finish the assignment at home and discuss their final answer with their parents/guardians.  The students will use their stories the next day as part of a fictional newscast which they will then place on their personal intranet as a podcast to be viewed by their parents the following night.

Meanwhile Sam’s science teacher is making use of pre prepared digital learning content[23] to create some high interest material  for a new study on “where matter comes from” and “how atoms form the basis of all matter”. She uses some video material from the Teacher's Domain,[24] cutting and pasting this into the year 9 science site and has added an introduction and some key "thinking questions".  Sam's teacher went through the "Powers of 10" web site[25] using the multimedia projector to show how extraordinarily small an atom is. To this she added a Java applet from the Java applet library[26] to show how atoms display different characteristics depending on the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus, and the number of electrons that orbit this nucleus.  Within an hour Sam's teacher has created an entire unit on the topic including extension work for both the gifted and talented and those who struggle with the concept of an atom.  By the time the unit is finished she is pleased with the resources used (with (c) permission) as well as those resources to which she had hyperlinked, and the resultant line of questioning.  She then places the unit of work in the science virtual library on the cluster intranet for other teachers to use.

At lunchtime Sam has arranged to meet up with his “Taking IT Global"[27] team in order to prepare a preliminary report targeting their desire  to see their local government representative take the  suggestion of bringing the country's level of aid to 0.7% of GNI (as part of the international "Make Poverty History"[28] campaign) to the national party conference.  The team was created as a result of a unit of work looking at global wealth distribution done last year, and has  maintained ongoing contact with the UK organisation ‘Make Poverty History’ Two members are missing and they are txt’d to find out where they are.  In order to get their point across the group has created their own web site and were keen to text the URL to their local politician but he has asked for the text to be e-mailed to him prior to their meeting so he can have a good understanding of what they are trying to achieve. The meeting is focusing on the fact that one of the group did an online search on the politician and discovered that despite his assertions of support he has blogged several times that “giving money to poor countries is as good as flushing it down the toilet" and they want to confront him with these statements and ask why these actions are not consistent with his comments to them. 

Meanwhile Nikki is involved in a brief conference with the teacher regarding her e-portfolio parent-teacher meeting scheduled for this evening.  The teacher explains to Nikki that the emphasis of the discussion that night will be on her talking to her parents about her progress and how she feels she is doing, rather than the teacher telling the parents how she thinks Nikki is doing. Nikki is given some time to read over what she has written in her Knowledge Journal and Knowledge Log over the past six weeks to refresh her memory.  The teacher has also asked Nikki to update her Knowledge Showcase (her online collected work) to illustrate how her artwork has progressed over this time.

After-school both Nikki and Sam are either at sports practices or "being seen" in the local mall until their mother finishes work at 5 o'clock. Nikki is quite excited as she has had three txt alerts from the “Foot Locker” through the course of the day saying that the anticipated sale of the sports shoes she wanted has finally materialised at the mall outlet.  Nikki has already sent a text to her mother to make sure that the money has been transferred to her EFTPOS account so that she can purchase the shoes at 50% off.

Sam is more interested in several anonymous txt messages he has received during the week that seem to suggest that a young girl in whom he has shown some limited interest doesn't mind his interest in the slightest.  This is in spite of two misinterpreted txt messages he had sent earlier in the week.  Sam is hoping that the hour in the mall this evening might throw some light on whether one of his mates is setting him up or whether this is the real thing. . . .

Comments and suggestions to

Mark Treadwell

Teachers@work.co.nz

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