ICTs, learning and why cooking crystal meth makes you a bad person

Recently, as I was perusing the work output of my tutorial students, I came across one individual with two windows up on his laptop. In one he had a very nice piece of formal writing and in the other he was desperately trying to re-watch the first four seasons of Breaking Bad before the final aired the following week. Responding to this would have been a pretty simple decision for me a few years ago. The logic in my thinking was pretty simple: he should work solely on his formal writing rather than switching between it and ruminations on how the complex decisions facing Walter White, Jesse Pinkman and friends might make us further confused about what makes people good and/or bad. If he works solely on the formal writing he’ll get a better grade in English. There is clear evidence that switching between two cognitively complex tasks (conveniently ignoring the fact that some might argue that watching TV isn’t a complex cognitive task) leads to a lower level of engagement and quality with both. Not to mention the fact that tutorial time is for working! On school work I mean, not other work! And when I say school work, I mean minimal time on satellite stuff loosely connected with regular subjects and more time on really hardcore stuff like assessment work!

But it’s not really that simple, is it? If you’re writing me off as a bleeding heart liberal at this point, please bear with me as I do my best to outline how this once simple decision has now become a deeply complex and angst-ridden internal conflict. Well not quite angst-ridden but definitely a little more complex. Student S (as we’ll henceforth refer to him as) will potentially do really well with that piece of formal writing, regardless of whether he’s switching between writing it and watching Breaking Bad during tutorial time. The fact is, that he’s got more than enough time to get a pretty convincing excellence before the piece is due. Of course this adds some complication around consistency if another student without the same skillset isn’t able to finish theirs because they’re also watching Breaking Bad. I could, I suppose, argue that Student S’s piece of writing won’t be as good if he multi tasks for the next half an hour but to be honest I’m not even sure that’s true. On the other hand while it’s not all that likely he’ll decide to become a drug dealer (he isn’t taking chemistry, physics is more his thing) I can see how engaging with the complex and layered characters in Breaking Bad might, in fact, give him some ideas for his own final piece of creative writing later in the year.

My response to this complex moral conundrum could be to tell Student S that he can’t watch Breaking Bad on the premise that it would make a difference to his final formal writing grade or that it isn’t equitable if other students aren’t able to do the same thing. The latter argument might hold some weight with him but probably not the former (Student S does have a reasonable social conscience.) Another option might be to push for a school-wide ban on the watching of films or TV series during tutorial, thus taking the responsibility of the decision away from me altogether. Although I’m not entirely sure I like the idea of being an enforcer more than that of a being a philosopher. The option I took in the end was to try and convince him that watching Breaking Bad would make it difficult to engage in his formal writing and that if he really wanted to enjoy the entirety of the first four seasons, he’d be far better off doing it at home on a decent-sized screen without sub-standard earbuds for sound.

It seems strange to me that I’ve only recently considered how many variables there are in a conversation with a student on what learning is the most important for them at any one time and why. There is the student’s complex list of priorities, my list of priorities (not all of which will be based solely on Student S’s best learning interests), the learning interests of the other students around Student S and finally there is the overarching consideration of what’s going to be the most useful to all of those groups in the future. And once we get into thinking about the future, anything I say about how useful a piece of learning might be will always involve some degree of speculation. And crikey, if there’s one thing that makes it obvious I’m not the fount of all knowledge, it’s an admission that some of what I’m saying might be speculation.

Perhaps in the rare times questions around the utility and value of the learning we’re delivering did used to come up, we might have been giving the curriculum a read over and seen those learning area justification sections. For the most part, students arrive in our class at the beginning of the year and they’re stuck with us for however long and regularly the timetable says they should be, and also with any decisions we make on what learning is the best for them. It’s not that we’ve never had to justify these things before it’s just that we haven’t had to all that often.

Given how technology is changing the face of learning however, it seems a risky proposition to go on ignoring what makes a particular type of learning valuable to an individual student or engaging with these questions in a surface manner with responses such as: students must alway work on what I’ve timetabled in exactly the order I’ve specified because that’s what’s best for them. In a world which continues to be changed by technology at a fairly rapid pace, engaging in conversations with students about what learning is valuable along with why and how it might help in the future seem pretty jolly important. We don’t need to pander to every whim of every student all the time, but we do need to help model the process of thinking about the importance and relevance of learning and engage in this actively with students. These conversations can be pretty intimidating especially when we’re already pressed for time or by the knowledge that students do need to pass assessments on a clearly specified set of skills. Not to mention the fact that we’re not even totally sure our individual beliefs on what’s important are even going to be that much more helpful for them than arbitrary rules with flimsy or non-learning based reasons for their existence. Still, we don’t have to worry about knowing it all now either. If they want more ideas on what particular piece of learning is important and why, they’ve always got the internet to go searching for other opinions!

So while after nearly having finished watching Breaking Bad myself I’m still pretty clear on the largely negative moral implications of cooking crystal meth. I’m still sadly a bit unclear, however, on my ethical responsibilities when it comes to directing what students should be working on. But maybe like Jesse, Walt and Vince Gilligan, I’ll just keep doing my best to respond and develop stuff as I go along and hope everything turns out OK. Just as long as I can get it sorted in time before the future arrives…

ICTs not clearly linked to learning outcomes? Teaching as Inquiry to the rescue!

Believe it or not, the use of ICTs in the classroom hasn’t yet been clearly linked to improved student outcomes! Check this quite nice overview of the relationship between ICTs and learning as it stands now. As we see governments sink a bunch of money into using ICTs in education all over the world (our own being as keen as all the rest) many of the links between the use of an ICTs and actual learning outcomes is often based solely on teacher observation. The 2009 report on the ICT PD school cluster programme only, “provides some proxy evidence of the conscious alignment of ICT-based classroom activities to identified student learning outcomes.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with empirical evidence per se. As teachers we have some pretty compelling observations of ICT benefits like: increased engagement, students better able to manage and make decisions about their own learning, increased collaboration and skills in managing this and access to more information with a subsequent responsibility for us to develop students’ skills in managing and critically thinking through the information morass that is the internet. While we continue to try and maximise the benefits of ICTs for students, we’re also getting better at helping them to avoid the learning negatives. We continue to consider what ‘non-learning’ stuff looks like on their devices: playing silly games, watching season 5 of Breaking Bad (a student in my tutorial last week was trying to re-watch all of series 1-4 while working on his formal writing - he wasn’t doing too bad actually!) and facebook for reminiscing about the weekend.

So while we’re informally observing some benefits of ICTs for our students, we’re also waiting for the academic research to identify direct links between ICTs and learning. Are there more rigorous ways we can find these links ourselves though? If we want to actively monitor how an ICT is helping improve student learning, Teaching as Inquiry offers us both a helping hand and a responsibility here. The focussing inquiry has emphasised the need for us to deeply question our theories on students’ present contexts before considering exactly how we might help improve outcomes with an appropriate choice of a practice change in the teaching inquiry phase of the process. The guts for how we might more carefully evaluate the learning outcome of an ICT comes in the learning inquiry. Not only does Teaching as Inquiry help us think about the learning before we get carried away with the ICT itself, it also shows us that if we consider how we’re going to measure the outcomes of an ICT before introducing it, we can get a more accurate understanding of what learning outcomes it has improved. We might just use observations as a way of doing this or we might seek data by asking students directly or even with formative assessments designed specifically to check this.

There are a bunch of good resources the MOE has provided to help us here too. Check out the generic e-learning as inquiry resources and e-learing as inquiry on literacy online. Although it seems that connecting ICT use directly to improved student learning outcomes might be difficult, I suspect academic research on these connections will eventually appear in one form or another. It will be interesting to see what this adds to our understanding of the relationship between technology, knowledge and learning. In the meantime though, lets get sharing our Teaching as Inquiry findings on how they’re working in our own classes!

What learning is the ‘right’ learning?

Since seeing a number of teachers in recent years using facebook for class groups I’ve had some difficulty coming to grips with the fact just because a student is on facebook, they might not necessarily be slacking off. It was sooooo easy a couple of years ago! Facebook??? “Naughty! Get back to work.” Now it’s all different. Facebook??? “Hmmm, that’s interesting. What group are you in there? Ohhh, it’s your health class group. Righto then.” It’s rather a lot more confusing and time consuming now. In the old days I could just order them to get back to work but now I have to inquire into what they’re actually doing. Sometimes I even end up in a lengthy conversation about what they’re learning in a vague attempt to cover or apologise for any initial assumptions I made that they weren’t learning anything useful.

But the thing that really bothers me, the stuff that’s starting to erode those old boundaries around what’s OK and what’s not, is that it’s not just whether they are on facebook that’s confusing, it’s a whole bunch of other thing as well. What makes learning the ‘right’ learning now? If they are working on a little bit of science in economics class, is it wrong when they’re choosing to prioritise an upcoming assessment they have next period? It certainly makes my job much easier as a teacher if they’re only allowed to work on my subject when they’re with me. Strangely though, during tutorial time we encourage them to prioritise the important work they need to do, anything that they need expert assistance on or really want to improve and now I’m telling them they just need to work on my subject for exactly one hundred minutes a day. Hmmmm. It doesn’t stop there though, what about learning beyond traditional subject boundaries? What if they’re reading up on something not specifically related to a school subject like project management or yacht design? And how do we justify our content anyway? Are the narratives in The Great Gatsby and For Whom the Bell Tolls more compelling than the events depicted in LA Noir, Fallout (who doesn’t love Ron Pearlman???) Red Dead Redemption (horrible spoiler in that link) or The Last of Us? Is the social commentary in computer games like these as powerful as Jane Austin’s? There might actually be some arguments both ways. And what about the student who is awesomely passionate about learning in one crazy area, I dunno, something like 3d animation and game design (I’d like to think of some non-nerdy examples here but that’s what I remember best) and they’re totally hating on that fifth subject they have to take. Are they ever going to be into that subject(s) they can’t stand? Even if they do believe that writing essays on literature or conducting science experiments will somehow help them in later life they still commonly fail at that-which-they-can't-stand. I guess they jolly well need to be interested if they want their level 2 NCEA! Gone are they old days where we could just answer the following question: “why are we learning this?” with something along the lines of, “because you’re in my class. And here’s a detention for being smart.” Whether or not students are more or less polite than they used to be isn’t the issue and it’s not even how well we can answer those questions respectfully that matters as much as how the concept of knowledge is changing and whether we are able to recognise this.

And who is the most concerned about the weight of evidence either way between the values of old and new anyway? I’d suggest that winning these arguments with students (or even framing them up as arguments to begin with) isn’t actually as important for us as educators as developing skills outside the areas that used to suffice. There’s a fascinating article here which summarises some of David Weinberger’s work around How Technology Has Changed Our Idea of ‘Knowledge,’ and What This Means for Schools. As much as a I hate some blogger’s inadequate summary of another text (go read the original! It’s awesome) the article examines Weinberg’s view of the differences between knowledge-transfer via printed media and how this differs from digital media, particularly in terms of the speed at which knowledge is growing and how this is accessed. Books as the primary medium to transfer information led to a view of, “knowledge as a canon of generally accepted wisdom.” Given the way that publishing works, some information got through and other information didn’t. Hence our belief that knowledge in books is more or less authoritative. He goes on to cite reddit as a good example of how a system of knowledge transmitted via digital means can grow much faster and that, “It solves the manageability of information not by omitting knowledge, but by prioritizing it.” When it comes to the what-this-means-to-education bit, Weinberger makes the important point that our response to this shouldn’t be to restrict students to a few particular sources but help them to develop their own filter for what might not be reliable and/or relevant. Digital literacy and knowledge literacy along with the skills to grow useful knowledge collaboratively are far more important than aligning students with our view of what’s useful or relevant by restricting their access to less ‘useful’ or ‘authoritative/correct’ kinds of knowledge.

So as educators we face a real challenge here. We have to continue to adapt our own thinking around knowledge and what is ‘important’ learning and start to look beyond our traditional subject boundaries to define our role and skill-sets. When we’re trying to plan programmes to meet student needs or a student asks why they’re learning what they’re learning, I think of things like reputable universities offering free phds and a charter school that might offer a customised solution where a student does get to engage in one passion without having to choose the compulsory number of 5 subjects. I wonder if flexibility and helping students learn how to learn and make informed decisions on what to learn may be our best remaining selling point. Because not only do we need to keep developing our own understanding of what ‘useful’ knowledge looks like, we also need to guide students through this process, help them learn the skills to do it themselves so they can make up their own minds about what knowledge and learning may be useful in the future.

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.