So you’ve found an awesome ICT...

Here’s a pretty common scenario that occurs when we’ve found an ICT that we’re totally into and wonder whether it could also help others in their learning. I think this happens for nerds and non-nerds alike although some of the steps might be more intense for nerds.

Default and ad hoc ICT roll-out process:

1) I’ve found a really cool ICT.

2) I’ve started messing around with it and I’m pretty sure there’s some potential for students and/or teachers.

3) I’ve realised I’m pretty excited about this ICT and I’m talking to lots of people about it. But seeing as I do have at least some social skills, I usually manage to stop and ask them about their own day before they run away in the face of my over-earnest nerdiness.

4) I manage to convince another staff member or a student that this ICT is pretty awesome and they start using it too. (This step is sometimes omitted depending on the enthusiasm level in step 3)

5) I might have some loose ideas on why it’s useful so I roll it out in a class or I might even get roped into delivering some school-wide PD. Maybe I’m in a leadership position and I roll it out to a bunch of captive teachers! Everyone will get its benefits now! 

6) A few people suffer from computer rage while learning how to use it but I’m still feeling pretty hopeful other people will get some learning benefits.

7) A while down the track, apart from a few isolated nerds, not many people are still using it. That’s OK though because I’m still using it and I might have even found another ICT that looks nice. If it’s been delivered to teachers school-wide or students class-wide though, I might be invested in proving it’s really useful (or, shock horror, it’s cost money) so I’ll need to keep trying to prove it is really useful.

Unless we’ve expended a disproportionate amount of resources in step 6 for a school-wide or class-wide roll out, there’s nothing terribly problematic with this scenario. Unfortunately this default approach, while practical and low on planning time, does limit the usefulness of ITCs in learning. Even when we try to approach implementation carefully it can be difficult to avoid some of the pitfalls of the default approach, particularly if we’ve been given the mantle of “ICT or e learning expert,” just because we seem to know a bit about computers.

There are quite a few reasons why it’s hard for us to approach ICTs in a manner that is most likely to give us, other staff and our students maximum learning gains. The enthusiasm that can come with new ICTs, while initially useful, can also be a problem. The eye-candy score could be really high (the UI might even be usable!) and other people might be a bit excited about an ICT and pass this on to us. Perhaps part of the enthusiasm is a sign then there is some learning potential there but this alone shouldn’t lead us on to make implementation decisions. To avoid limited learning usefulness and inefficient use of resources, we need to ensure a decent amount of time is spent considering the possible learning outcomes of an ICT.

Another thing that is easy to do with an ICT is assume that because it’s worked for one person, in one situation that it will work for everyone else in a similar situation. That’s a statement with some pretty big implications with school-wide rollouts of ICTs, especially if an ICT is being sold to us by various parties who have a vested interest in convincing us of its benefits. I’m presently attending a conference where exactly that is happening. Which is great if we’re able to objectively consider the potential gains of an ICT versus the implementation complexity as well as the universality (usefulness across users and contexts) adequately before making any knee-jerk decisions on where to go next. This task can be quite difficult given the complex nature of ICTs - usage complexity, possible licensing, installation, maintenance etc etc. And the first person we talk to about an ICT generally won’t be able to provide all the information we need to make a considered decision.

The golden circle concept popularised by Simon Sinek could be helpful for a more careful analysis of ICTs. Sinek suggests that really effective companies consider and market the why (should I buy it) of a product first, before moving on to the how (is it useful/used) and what (is the product). He argues that the what is usually where people and marketing often start and that this isn’t as convincing to the human brain as starting with the why. While Sinek highlights the importance of sorting the why first, in an ICT context, this isn’t as important as just making darned sure we spend enough time checking whether we can develop a compelling why. Getting enthusiastic about an ICT is often a part of usefull a process of seeking out and investigating the learning potential of a whole range of tools and goes well with the why but isn’t as useful without if it’s all that drives us

Sinek’s original golden circle doesn’t quite cut it for ICTs however. There’s another really important consideration with ICTs that often gets overlooked or simplified. The who. Because ICTs are so context and use specific we also have to deeply consider the individual user. Also, the larger the group of whos gets, the more complicated implementation can be. Check out this dude’s revised golden circle that places the who circle right in the middle.

Perhaps with any decisions we make on using something to help people learn, whether it’s an idea, a commercial or free product, a system in a school or even a learning activity in class it’s always going to be a bit of a challenge to think about the who and why. While learning intentions in class are a great way to cover this in our planning and delivery of learning activities, we need a different process for ICTs. Especially if we’re going to put significant resources into helping others use it too.

So seeing as I’ve bagged the ad hoc approach to rolling out an ICT, I guess I’d better propose something else. With a few changes, this could also be used as a non-linear process:

Look, an exciting ICT!!!

Who are the other people that could get a learning use from it?

What exactly are the possible uses they could benefit from?

Why should they use it or what learning benefits could they get from this use? (This may or may not be clear in the previous step.)

If these people were to develop expertise with this ICT, what would their learning needs be?

What other ICTs are they using already that could do the same job?

How useful is it actually going to be, given their needs and the ICTs they are presently using?

If I can cover all that off, how am I going to best help them use it? The more diverse their needs, the more complex it may be to support them in using it.

If I’m still excited about the whole thing at this point, decide how I’m going to measure whether it’s proving useful or not.

Go talk to other people and look for some data or research to check all this before making a decision.

If I’m still keen at this point, go do it! And good luck!

The Luddite Cringe

Any kind of change (especially really big ones that affect heaps of people) generally provoke protests and cautionary tales from various parties who object to what’s being done, often on the grounds that it won’t cater for an important need of some kind or that its benefits are overstated at best or non-existent at worst. Perhaps more importantly, opponents to change will often identify a number of negative implications that they believe others haven’t properly identified or understood. When large-scale changes linked to society are mixed with education, we get even more worried because the whole thing might mess up the future. In all this, often emotive, mix it can be easy to overlook how some of the previous mental models, schema or underlying assumptions that were useful and relevant at one point in history can lead us to interpret things in a problematic way.

This is a particularly pertinent issue with technology and learning because technology has changed relatively quickly in recent history while education has (in many ways) changed somewhat more slowly. As educators responsible for our own learning and the learning of others, it is important that we’re able to think about not only technology and learning together but also the ways in which our own mental models can affect how we think about technology in the learning process. In an attempt to make all this a bit more tangible, I’ll outline a few examples of what I’ve started to label as luddite cringe. Luddite cringe is kind of like cultural cringe, except instead of reacting negatively to say, New Zealand accents in film, we’re reacting in particular ways to technology in education.

There’s a really interesting article here which summarises some recent, potentially surprising, findings in a piece of research around students’ writing skills and ICTs. “He [a student in the survey] also said the auto-correct spelling feature on his iPhone has had a negative effect. "My spelling sucks," he texted.” This quote is a nice example of the impending doom that’s been proclaimed time and time again by concerned citizens since the invention of the short messaging service for mobile phones. Obviously we would be hard pressed to deny that text message abbreviations were going to affect young peoples’ spelling abilities to some degree, I guess the worry around this could be optimistically reframed as a concern around accuracy in the communication of meaning. All that said, the following quote (which sums up some of the findings of the research) is also really interesting. But, he added, "I guess that they [ICTs/digital technologies] all help involve writing in my life because idk [look that one up yourself if you need to] how much I'd write if I didn't have texting and stuff." As the introduction to the research points out “According to teachers, students’ exposure to a broader audience for their work and more feedback from peers encourages greater student investment in what they write and in the writing process as a whole.” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the tradeoff was worth it.

So what exactly is this luddite cringe and what mental models or inadequate lenses are causing it to happen? In various kinds of luddite cringe I see (from myself often! A few years back I ranted to whoever I could get to listen to me that tablets were evil because they didn’t have keyboards) we make two mistakes:

1) We don’t give enough credit to the agency and intentions of the learner and

2) We fail to recognise what things we think are necessary (or part of conventions, traditions or existing societal structures) that aren’t going to be as bigger deal in the (often but not always near) future. Basically, our mental models aren’t cutting it.

With the mobile phone texting and digital technology luddite cringe, we’ve failed to assume that students will be able to identify any decline in technical writing accuracy themselves and additionally, that they won’t recognise the times when writing and spelling correctly is particularly important versus the times when it's not so essential. It's interesting to note that the student in the survey was able to recognise that correct spelling was at least an issue to consider. Which, given the ongoing grief we do give students about it, is hardly surprising. (Check out the research and the article if you want a more detailed summary of the stats and findings.) Along with all the worry about declining standards in the technical aspects of writing, I think I'd more commonly receive emails at work that aren't capitalised or far from correctly punctuated than I would the ‘proofread’ ones. And I'm talking about emails from all kinds adults here not students. Most of the students I talk to are pretty jolly clear about when writing needs to be technically accurate without me having to harp on about it. And that authentic moment when they do need to learn the skills to get it right will hopefully be one when myself or another teacher are there to help them with it.

The rant potential doesn’t stop there with luddite cringe contributing factor 2. I might be starting to stretch a bit here, but when considering recent ideas on the recasting of knowledge as a verb, placing value on creating knowledge in collaborative settings and finding uses for it rather than passively receiving it as individuals, I also wonder whether we are starting to place greater value on dynamic, ongoing and responsive communication. It may be that there is more recognition for the role this communication plays than a traditional emphasis on single-shot, one-way delivery where an expert passes on information in a one to many medium. Perhaps if the former of these two types of communication, a process that enables flexible, responsive communication as an ongoing process rather than say the act of reading a piece of writing where the event has a clear beginning and end is something we value, then the accurate, precise meanings that might be better communicated with perfect grammar and spelling aren’t quite so important. If a context where we are working towards greater understandings of each other’s ideas (experts and newbies) and better ways of doing things consists of two-way, ongoing communication and a continuing development of knowledge, any inaccuracies in communication can be overcome as the process continues and iterates. It does make a kind of sense then, that in the old school learning where we’re more ‘deeply’ filling our brains with one expert person’s ideas in the course of a discrete event, precise expression and technical accuracy are potentially much more crucial. I’m not suggesting one is necessarily better than the other here - we’re all far better off if students can learn the skills to effectively read a textbook on dam engineering (where the ideas of the expert are particularly essential if you’re living down river) and engage in developing knowledge responsively and collaboratively, perhaps (but not necessarily) not with the help of ICTs. Believing that there’s only a limited number of ways to do develop knowledge well and that these need to be based on older technologies or more accepted ways of doing things is just plain crazy imo. Surely choosing the best method of developing knowledge, fit for purpose, is better than being limited to one way of doing things simply because the technology provided us with one method (ie the printing press) a while back?

Nicholas Carr in his recent book “The Shallows” describes concern over “how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.” Since reading books avidly as a youngster and having access to the internet a little bit later, my experiences have been quite different. If I’m perusing wikipedia (but surely that’s not where you go for serious reading?) or maybe something a bit heavier and academic and come across a term I want to know more about, I can check it easily. I don’t need to drive to the library to get out a different book to read up on important contextual information before I can properly consider the overall picture of what I’m trying to develop an understanding of. After considering a piece of contextual information in the light of whatever else I started with, I’ll often choose to go back to my original topic. In short, the potential offered by the internet is pretty darned awesome and in the way that I think about knowledge, I can actually deepen my understanding of what I’m learning about rather than the opposite. Just as I’m able to, either through external pressure or internal motivation, keep on one topic. We can’t short-change our learners and their ability to develop the skills and dispositions to stay on track with whatever purpose is driving them. Just like us, students can learn not be distracted by all that electronic noise the doom sayers might proclaim is such a large danger.

And what exactly does deep knowledge look like anyway? Is it the findings, opinions of synthesis of one person? The author or a particular book or blog? Why must we follow the thought-train that worked well for one individual just because that’s the detail and order in which they’ve decided to set it down in a book? Is that the only form that deep learning takes? How are they ways we’ve considered knowledge in the past over-feeding our paranoia of what the internet and digital technologies can do to the minds of the nation’s youth? The thing that bothers me the most about the type of thinking that views the internet and digital technologies as promoting “shallowness” is how much is detracts from the agency of the individual learner. If any learner is able to identify purpose, use, relevance and what success looks like in relation to all this, can’t they also be trusted (with the right kind of assistance when needed) to use any source available to develop the knowledge that’s needed? And who’s going to explain to them what kind of knowledge is going them the most in the future anyway?

That massive rant aside, I’m not trying to understate the things we should watch out for when helping our learners to follow whichever information journey they need set out on for a certain purpose, but just as we are continuing to change our view of exactly what teaching and learning is and our role in it, we need to help our students learn how to get the most out of the technology they have access to. While that’s hardly a new idea, perhaps the other thing that’s harder to keep in mind is that we need to do this while simultaneously and constantly revisiting our own mental models in relation to technology and learning. And next time we identify a deep, unarticulated worry that we think might be related to technology and how it could affect our students’ learning, we also need to consider our own view of the world, technology and knowledge and how this might (or might not!) need to change. In an attempt to be more concise: we should always try to  identify the difference between genuine issues and plain old luddite cringe.

The List of ICTs Alwayses

What things should we always keep in mind when thinking about ICTs and education? Probably a bunch of stuff! And I expect everyone would have a somewhat different list of these. At the risk of being over-assertive and incorrectly using English, I’ve decided to title this list as “ICT Alwayses”. IE: The things we should always do when thinking about using ICTs in teaching and learning.

In the interests of disclosure, I'll point out that this is a slightly edited version of my final post over in ICTs in English on English Online. I'll be blogging edited versions of some of my favourites from the old list in between new fortnightly blog entries. Stay tuned for new content later in the week! 

So without further preamble, here's the alwayses list:

1. Always think about our learning AND the learning of students when considering an ICT. Sometimes these two groups will have things in common but other times there will be issues that are not so important to one but really important for the other. Some ICTs work well for the needs of one group and not so well for the other while some work for both groups. It’s important we don’t miss out on some potential if we’ve only come across discussion around one of these contexts and not the other.
    
2. Always have a learning intention or outcome in mind when implementing an ICT. Even if someone really important is suggesting or ordering you to use something, ask: what will the learning outcome(s) be? Sometimes a delightful accident can make ICT use worthwhile even if we don’t have an outcome in mind but to really use them well we need to plan what we expect to get out of them.
    
3. While doing number 2, always be open to new learning possibilities that may not necessarily be part of your original learning intention. This is probably true of most things we can use in teaching and learning but particularly true with ICTs.
    
4. When learning about the use of an ICT, always be resilient and pigheaded and promote resilience and pig-headedness in others. Coming to grips with ICTs is often highly challenging! You’ll usually need every ounce of resilience and stubbornness you can get. And to make it even more challenging, often the most powerful ICT will be the most challenging to use. There’s an old software engineering concept that can help us here.
   
   If us or our students vertical line of “frustration maximum - I can’t deal with this ICT anymore” comes before the red and blue lines intersect. We may give up on a potentially powerful (blue line) ICT before we realise the possible benefits of it. This is why lots of people use ICTs that aren’t particularly powerful (red line) as they are less frustrating to learn in the short run. Sadly, we can be less willing to spend long enough learning about a potentially powerful ICT (blue line) unless some handy individual like ourselves can explain the future learning benefits. This also highlights the needs for ‘Alwayses #1’ - if we’ve got a clear reason for and ICTs use and benefits, the pain of learning the darned thing might be enough of a motivation to keep going.
    
5. Always be open to students using their own ICT expertise and give them guidance on how to harness this for the relevant learning. We don’t always need to know exactly how to use a particular ICT (clicks, menus ins and outs etc) if we understand the capabilities and learning potential for it. If students have expertise in an ICT, we can give them advice and feedback on its use in a subject area without knowing exactly what to click, push or interact with.
    
6. Always look for ways to collaborate. Whether it’s to develop your ideas on e-learning, work on the resourcing of an ICT, discuss their uses or find out about how other people are using them, there’s always going to be something out there that will be relevant to your students and their contexts! You just need to find it...
    
7. Always be excited about ICTs....some of the time. Computery technology (that’s my technical term for computing technology that is connected to computers in some way but not always an actual computer) is always going to get annoying and make you want to rage-quit eventually. Seeing as we can’t be excited about computery stuff all the time, being excited about it some of the time is the next best thing. This also rubs off on our students. Even if you can’t remember or do 1,2,3,4,5 and 6, sometimes Alwayses number 7 can keep you going long enough to sort out the others. Teaching and learning is rarely clear-cut, perfectly planned and executed and discrete. This is particularly obvious when we throw ICTs into the mix.
   

It’s likely there are a bunch more alwayses out there that can help us get the most out of ICTs but hopefully the above will be of some help in the future. Please add some feedback with your own alwayses, questions, comments or anything you disagree with. We have some pretty diverse opinions on teaching and learning stuff and this is this diversity is even greater around ICTs and e-learning. Sharing these opinions and working to understand different perspectives can only make us better at helping improve learning for our students.