When two edu-tribes go to war…

Steve Wheeler is posting a bite-size series of blog posts over the next week around the theme of  ’Digital Tribes, Virtual Clans.‘

They are based on a chapter he contributed to a wider work entitled ‘Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures.‘ The first two posts on ‘Digital tribal identity‘ and ‘The digital tribe and the network nation‘ are highly accessible and have made fascinating reading thus far. His writing got me thinking and I respond to it, tangentially and with a lack of clarity but grateful nevertheless for its inspiration.

Wheeler asserts that the world wide web and it ‘mediating technologies’ have become a key means by which the ‘cultural capital’ of group identity is formed and maintained. Cultural capital is ‘the set of invisible bonds that tie a community together without which societal cohesiveness begins to unravel.’

New digital communities located in cyberspace, not bound by any traditional geographical, social or political boundaries, are eroding the cultures or identities of traditional tribes and clans – particularly through the superior capability of mediating technologies to effectively spread contagious, identity-shaping patterns of information or ‘memes.’

Digital communities are indeed thriving, each with their own group identity shaped by the interactions of individuals within them. However, does new ‘cultural capital’ always have an eroding, detrimental effect on the culture of traditional tribes? Can digital communities complement the cultural capital of long-standing tribes or is ongoing competitive tension inevitable? Is it possible, in the long term, for traditional tribes and clans to meld into a new shared identity that shares the best of both worlds.

In education for example, these questions and the processes that take place in the finding of the answers, seem to me to be of crucial importance. A tribe of educators has arisen online with many different clans, - its culture shaped by memes such as the importance of technologies to collaborate, to publish to real audience with authentic  purpose for effective learning.  Traditional geographically based communities of educators in local authorities and districts identify with more traditional educational memes. Will the online educational community erode the traditional one into extinction or will a new edu-tribe arise from the ashes with a culture that harnesses the potential to broaden horizons while celebrating the unique learning opportunities offered by every educational setting?

The very basics of what it means to have self-identity through time , a core character that defines everything that an individual does and is, has been changed by the world wide web. One can operate with different identities across different tribes online, in a way that just isn’t possible offline. It means that educators can identify with both the online educational clans and the traditional clans in which they find themselves too. Those educators who find themselves with a foot in both camps will be the individuals who will ‘act in concert to perpetuate the social cohesion’ of any new edu-tribe.

At the micro-level, the ‘clan’ of the classroom is the perfect example of where this melting pot of cultures can be created. About nine years ago my Year Six class were bored with using blogs and their discussion boards to communicate with peers they saw every day in meatspace. It was then that we began using the same mediating technologies to meaningfully collaborate with teachers and students from UC Berkeley’s Academic Talent programme – across the globe in the USA. The mixing of cultures – the geographically bound classroom with the  global digital connections – broadened the horizons of the pupils and myself, brought about a new culture of learning with a new identity, fuelled by memes of real purpose, real audience and real responsibility. We were still geographically bound but our classroom no longer had any walls. It was just the start to our clan adventures!

These are the type of clans that I hope will make up the edu-tribes of  the future in Northamptonshire and beyond. Swallow the meme and it just might happen!

Education needs fewer rockstars, and more rockstar ideas

Mack Collier’s ‘Social media needs fewer rockstars, and more rockstar ideas‘ makes some really interesting points about how, in his world of social media, ideas are often valued on the basis of how prominent (in terms of followers/subscribers etc) the author is the online community – the so-called ‘rock-star’ effect. This makes the threshold too high for getting new ideas from new folks out into the effective thought- and collaboration space online.

This is not only a concern in the world of social media but also in the world of online education.The online education echo-chamber has preoccupied and frustrated me from time to time over the years. Edublogging celebrity even drove me to poetry a while back.

When I first seriously started using Twitter almost 1000 tweets ago, I thought it would be the antidote to the ‘rock star’ effect. For me, it wasn’t primarily about following people. It was about following conversations. You were afforded a glimpse into conversations that people were having with folks that you weren’t following, building a learning network organically as the conversations turned to areas of interest. Then Twitter changed the default behaviour of the technology so that you could not see the conversations that your followers were having with others outside your network. Twitter became a ‘fishbowl’ for me at that moment.

The only real way to further build the network is to throw numbers of people into your bowl in the hope of building conversations. I must say at this point that I am incredibly happy with the drip-feed of ideas, humour  and experience that my small fishbowl of 200 followers provides. However, I wonder how easy it would be for say, a bevy of Northamptonshire teachers, new to Twitter, to get their ideas heard or to get an effective following that would allow them to make use of the rock-star audience techniques of calling for responses for stuff they are doing in the classroom.

I have always waxed lyrical about the beauty of potentially-global, online collaboration and communication, enjoying its benefits in my classrooms and schools. It is brilliant to connect with like-minded individuals from around the world, at a Teach-Meet, or on a Sunday evening video conference. How though do you take those principles and apply and implement them across a county or region? My bluff has been called after all these years in my new job! How do you bottle the scatter-gun of enthusiasm and collaboration from around the country/world and make it happen in your immediate locality? How do you ensure that regions are producing people and ideas that are feeding in the online educational ecosystem, widening and embedding the principles of TeachMeet or ETRU throughout the local level?

Recognising that this is the $ 64000 question, I of course do not have the answer but I’m sure Mack Collier’s advice is part of the solution:

Listen closely to new ideas from new voices, and magnify both when you hear them. So many of us complain about the ‘fishbowl’ mentality in the social media space. A great way to counter that is to bring new voices with fresh takes into this space. Introduce your network to someone they might not have heard of previously. Yes we all know who the ‘rockstars’ in this space are, so show us who’s next. - Mack Collier

Taking Mack’s advice on board I’ve wiped my blog subscriptions clean (yet again) and am on the look out for ideas from people I haven’t read before and also from disciplines outside education. My twitter fishbowl will keep me ‘ticking over’ educationally while I make a foray into new areas to see what ideas and conversations they offer up. Perhaps I will find the answer to my $64000 question. I’ll be sure to let you know who I meet along the way. If there are any edu-rock stars out there with a rock-star solution, I’ll download your next album

Edublogging bloglebrity

Mirror mirror on the wall

Who are the greatest edubloggers of them all?

Why are you asking me. I don’t know.

Give them their own trumpet and let them blow.

The loudest sounds will provide a gist,

about who aspires to life on the ‘A-list’.

Another clue is link-showering determination,

to join the elite of mutual appreciation.

If for this lofty goal you wish to fumble,

Ensure everyone knows you are ‘so very ‘umble.”

Student engagement in social software outside school context

Ewan at blog.ac.uk

It would seem logical to involve students’ MySpace or Bebo – their ‘real life’ online space. If we don’t, and therefore devalue their private online space by insisting on sole use of the institutional online space (school-run blog or wikis for example) for ‘serious’ school work, will kids not do what kids do, and use their own space to do what they want anyway? And will what they produce on the ‘serious’ learning space not be false, of a lesser quality, because it’s not at all integrated into their own private life?

Not sure about blurring social spaces. If MySpace is the place where students ‘hang out’ socially with their friends, like the village green when I was a kid, then surely we value it by recognising it and not intruding on it. I would have died if my teachers, or parents for that matter, had seen what went on on the village green, let alone carried out a teaching session there

Stranded travel-writers

Lloyd Nebres: Although to many the idea of living on Maui might seem like paradise, the island is really a microcosm of society at large, with its own problems and perils.

Striving to find a balanced view of a place’s identity strikes me as a really worthwhile research project. Scraping beneath the surface of the perceived reputation, good or bad, media-driven or anecdotal, would demand research and thinking skills and quite probably the ability to use the web as a platform for getting firsthand information and evidence from ‘experts’ on the ground. Students would be doing much more than simply regurgitating the contents of the local tourist board’s website.

The key to the success of this kind of research is to first give students experience  of exploring and analysing the identities and reputations of their own environments.

People constantly tell me that Nottingham is the ‘gun crime capital’ of the UK. That is its reputation – how true and representative is that statement? Wikipedia has some views that could be worth examining. A simple search reveals the negative stuff but the challenge is to find some positive balance. Paul Carroll has started to scrape below the surface as has Dave Severn. How though do I find balance in my own views?

In my view, Lloyd reports both the positive and negative aspects of Maui, not like a text-book writer but rather like a travel-writer in-situ. In the course of his habitual writing about a whole range of subjects, he also makes time to both record (both in writing and in photos) and make his own sense of the geographical, economic and social landscape in which he finds himself.

Through his posting, classification and responsible linking to related sources over a long period of time, he has built a reputation through which others can ‘measure’ his objectivity or balance. By sharing his views he provides welcome insight and a springboard for others to research and come to their own conclusions.

I’m sure that this ‘exploration and examination’ of his home environment, helps him understand, or at least ask the right questions, of other places and issues that may be removed from him geographically.

I like the idea of students as ‘stranded’ travel-writers who are encouraged to write regularly for assessment purposes to make sense of their surroundings. I also love the idea of using of photography in this whole process, not only as a record but also as a stimulus for questions that beg a search for answers. I’m meeting with Dave on Wednesday to think about how we can encourage both aspects in an online project.

Self-conscious bloggers?

Christine McIntosh in her post ‘Self-conscious bloggers?’ asks how self-conscious we are when we blog, whether we feel we have an image to maintain and whether ‘a closed blog, with limited access/posting, makes life easier for the inhibited.’

I find that in certain areas of my writing I am much more self-conscious than others and sometimes for different reasons. Locked away in the ‘Face for Radio Poetry Collection’ are some of my poems that I craft and re-craft, over and over in the vain hope that one day I will be satisfied with them. I am incredibly fragile about my poetry and like the ability to hide it. One day I will be brave enough to open the door though.

Other protected areas of this blog are placeholders for projects that I want to be finished before I show others. My ‘Blogging at the Chalkface’ link is simply to be an annotated set of links to some of what I consider to the highlights of my experiences with blogs in the classroom. I thought I should just get them all in one place as a sort of blogging autobiography.

In both of the above examples, the ability to limit access to a post serves as a personal stepping stone in the creative process towards publication before an audience. I like the freedom to sometimes do that but if the whole blog was permanently shut off to the world then I would see little point in using it. Sometimes students want ‘creative stepping stones’ before presenting themselves through their writing to the world, assurance from people they trust that what they are writing is ‘ok’. I can remember good teachers who helped me first of all, to value my own writing and then to get over the subsequent ‘stagefright’ of publishing it or performing it to an audience. I think the flexibility to hide or draft writing is an important feature of weblogging software in this regard.

Whether we like it or not, regular writing on a public platform will convey an ‘image’ of who we are, at least in part. For me, the maintenance of this image is more or less subconscious but is borne out organically over time in my conscious choices of subject matter for reading and writing, of my hyperlinking and my involvement in online ‘conversations’ with others. This process is in turn shaped by an awareness of audience that often differs from post to post. My purpose for writing this post is to respond to Christine. She is my perceived audience although I’m aware that others may read and respond to it. Sometimes a post is written with a far more general audience in mind. At other times I simply write for myself to try and record or make sense of my own experiences. All these factors make up my online ‘image’ but I think I would be driven mad with a sort of virtual schizophrenia, if I had to consciously maintain it.

My wife had just read this and says that I should get out more…