Disclaimer: throughout this post Twitter is mentioned as a digital space. Not all age groups access Twitter. I mostly work with elementary where we use private share spaces within our learning community. Where I mention Twitter, we could also be talking about Murally, Google Classroom, Google Docs, Padlet, TodaysMeet, message boards, and other digital share space.
“...Twitter’s strength is engaging us in divergent thinking…. brainstorming, networking and spontaneous, free-flowing exchange of ideas… for a powerful synthesis, use Twitter within the context of site-based collaborative inquiry. This dynamic duo offers [students] the divergent-thinking benefits of Twitter for networking and idea sharing within a focused context of deep inquiry to solve challenges…” - Tonya Ward Singer
Moving students through divergent and convergent thinking, individually and in what the d.School calls the “radical collaboration” mindset, is part of what has been identified in 21st Century Learning Skills, the new draft of the ISTE Student Standards, in the New Literacies, and is used by the Buck Institute in their collaboration rubric. Our tech tools can often provide mirrors for reflection, here addressing three big questions:
- How is collaborative learning manifested from the unwritten Socratic dialectic to modern standards to frontiers of New Literacies? (this post)
- How are digital spaces extensions of our physical spaces and what does that indicate about our theory of learning? (later post)
- Where are current practices leading us in understanding new literacies and individual versus group production? (later post)
21st Century Learning
The Framework for 21st Century Learning stresses the redesign of learning environments using...
“multiple environments to teach and reinforce the value of communication skills.”
In these “multiple environments” or spaces, the use of digital spaces both synchronously and asynchronously enables a broader range of modalities for student engagement. The four C’s outlined (creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking) echo the d.School’s mindsets ...
“...students learn best from a mix of individual and group-based learning experiences...”
and continue...
“...collaboration can enhance the development of critical thinking skills.”
ISTE Student Standards
In January 2016 ISTE released a draft of the updated Student Standards which greatly expands both their descriptions of empowered student metacognition, multimodality of expression and communal divergent thinking thinking spaces. These two domains show a new attention to documenting collective and individual process and product. (finalized Standards to be released at ISTE in Denver this summer).
New Literacies
“New Literacies” according to Henry Jenkins, surround participatory culture where digital tools enable remixes, mashups, gaming, media validation, curation and manipulations, and most importantly maneuvering through surrounding affinity spaces. This new skill set, and some would argue is a "secondary orality" or "post-Gutenberg parenthesis" building from a much older skill set, includes...
- Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
- Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
- Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
- Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
- Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
- Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
- Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
- Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
- Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
- Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
- Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
This shift is happening from home, in after school programs, in alternative learning spaces, and is slowly becoming a part of our school's environment.
The Common Core
Anything related to creativity, innovation, or collaboration in the Common Core gets delegated to Speaking and Listening Standards, which make sense if you are creating standards whose objective is to create national measurements from standardized tests. The subjective softer skills surrounding collaboration, the skills the job market is crying for, are not so easy to quantify with bubbles. The anchor standard reads…
Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
...a watered down dialectic, but perhaps a fitting praise of Socrates who would not have approved of writing anything down for fear of making our memories weak. The primary and elementary indicators invalidate the capacity of young minds to think critically and learn from the diversity of ideas around them. Bill Gates and company apparently don’t know Ron Berger or the Emilia Reggio program. By third grade students are basically expected not to talk out of turn and to “stay on topic”. By ninth grade things get more interesting with clear parallels to ISTE Standards and New Literacies.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1.C Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that relate the current discussion to broader themes or larger ideas; actively incorporate others into the discussion; and clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1.D Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives, summarize points of agreement and disagreement, and, when warranted, qualify or justify their own views and understanding and make new connections in light of the evidence and reasoning presented.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.2 Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.3 Evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence.
Again, why the overlap with ISTE, 21st Century Learning, and New Literacies only comes under Speaking and Listening is unfortunate, but it does exist, and the standards provide pivotal points to bridge methods for reading and writing in collaborative space. Where project work is expected, the expectations for group collaboration get more specific.
The Buck Institute
The Buck Institute provides open source materials for managing project based learning where there is a clear emphasis on individual contribution, group critique, and collective product. These segments come from their collaboration rubric…
- uses feedback from others to improve work
- asking probing questions
- responding thoughtfully to new information and perspectives
- gives useful feedback (specific, feasible, supportive) to others so they can improve their work
- acknowledges and respects other perspectives, disagrees diplomatically
- recognizes and uses special talents of each team member
- tasks done separately are brought to the team for critique and revision
The d.School
The d.School at Stanford offers a series of mindsets and methods around project work centered around developing empathy for a user. “Radical Collaboration” mandates a wide breadth of perspectives allowing for solutions to emerge from diversity. Within their method set are improv routines for getting group dynamics synched into soft or hard focus, awareness of others and “stokes” to create an uninhibited environment open to innovation. Critiques start with praise, “I like”, move to negatives, “I wish”, and move forward with suggestions for growth, “I wonder”. The critique method is part of the opening of the classroom space for a culture of collaboration, and perhaps returns us to a much older, human centered learning.
Returning to an Old Path
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, often wrongly reduced to “next step learning”, explains that a learner’s environment encompasses multiple tools, including peers and teacher, and these tools can leverage a broader scope of learning objectives within the learner’s reach. Our assessment systems predominantly emphasize individual measurement, however the true measure should involve what students can do with the critique of their classmates. Ron Berger’s An Ethic of Excellence, or in flash summary form in Austin’s Butterfly, unpack this potential of learning community as part of Vygotsky’s toolkit.
"If you want to know your own soul, you must talk to other people." - Socrates
Before justifying Twitter as collaborative tool, we should consider Socrates. The dialectic serves as the awakening of the intellect, and face to face discussion is still at the center (have you tried getting a digital dialectic going on a MOOC discussion board?). Consider how University of Chicago's Junior Great Books strategically leverages the Symposium at the end of the week. The small group, culminating 15 minute discussion, is the learning product. All reading, writing reflections, and critical dialogues up to that moment front load student cognition leading up to the Symposium. “Socratic Circles” (later post) discuss how Twitter or alternative digital spaces preload discussions before the event, and how all minds present at the event are activated.
More than two centuries later, Paulo Freire described teaching as a political act in which critical dialogues are at the center of this act, awakening both oppressors and oppressed. His friend and collaborator, Augusto Boal, developed methods in participatory theater to define and explore problems often beyond participants' cognisance. Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed opens up the idea that the game/play space of theater creates a low threshold entry into an uninhibited fail-safe space to explore empathy for divergent perspectives, and transform passive spectators into spect-actors ready to act upon this empathy. In this process, if the student enters as willing player, an inevitable aesthetic, ethical, affective connection to learning occurs. They key here is to extend our concept of space to include digital interactions as well, but also to pull back from the digital, not use it as a magic crutch, and make the collaborative practices living events within our physical space as well.
New Tool New Considerations
The thinking behind ISTE Student Standards, 21st Century Learning, New Literacies, Design Thinking, Buck Institute, and Common Core seem to agree that learning is socially constructed. In exploring Twitter as part of this social construction I’ll expand on the following in upcoming posts…
- social construction happens best when our learning spaces explicitly facilitate interaction with tools such as "thinking moves"
- digital spaces are real extensions of our physical learning spaces and the same cultural rules must be established, each space must validate the other
- digital space brings us closer to our private speech and inner dialogue, enabling both deeper metacognition, and authentic contribution to the group
- digital space enables crowdsourced ideas instantaneously requiring a new understanding of space, purpose, and collective construction, we don’t have to wait for our “turn to speak”, nor should we wait until 9th grade to exercise collective intelligence, it is part of our innate toolkit
Our digital spaces are still very new, like new fetishized gadgets that we can’t wait to play with. That impulse often inhibits their potentials and this is the wicked challenge, to manage ourselves before we manage our tools. It's fair to say that, like photography was a technological curiosity for 100 years before the intent of the eye on the other side of the lens was taken seriously, the true potentials of our current tech tools have just begun. Jaron Lanier recounts his experience at SXSW a few years ago...
“After I took the stage, the first thing I said… was that it would be a worthy experiment for the audience to not tweet or blog while I was talking. Not out of respect for me, I explained, but out of respect for themselves. If something I said was memorable enough to be worthy of a tweet or a blog post later on - even if it was to register violent disagreement - then that meant what I said would have had the time to be weighed, judged, and filtered by someone’s brain. Instead of just being a passive relay for me, I went on, what was tweeted, blogged, or posted on a Facebook wall would then be you. Giving yourself the time and space to think and feel is crucial to your existence. Personhood requires encapsulation. Your have to find a way to be yourself before you can share yourself.” - Jaron Lanier
References
Berger, R. (2003). An ethic of excellence: Building a culture of craftsmanship with students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Berger, R. (2003). An ethic of excellence: Building a culture of craftsmanship with students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Boal, A. (1985). Theatre of the oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Boal, A. (1992). Games for actors and non-actors. London: Routledge.
Boraks, N. (1985). The Junior Great Books Program: Can Impact be Measured? Retrieved June 7, 2016, from http://americanreadingforum.org/yearbook/yearbooks/85_yearbook/pdf/41_Boraks.pdf
Buck Institute. (n.d.). 3-5 Collaboration Rubric (CCSS Aligned) | Project Based Learning | BIE. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from http://bie.org/object/document/3_5_collaboration_rubric_ccss_aligned
EL Education. (2013). Austin's Butterfly: Building Excellence in Student Work - Models, Critique, and Descriptive Feedback. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZo2PIhnmNY
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Preparing America's students for success. (n.d.). Retrieved June 07, 2016, from http://www.corestandards.org/
ISTE. (n.d.). DRAFT 1 - 2016 ISTE Standards for Students. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qPWppmNVJXeOrguvkrQA_KWHkUMWozIwL326kn6yHyo/edit
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robinson, A. J., & Weigel, M. (n.d.). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Retrieved June 7, 2016, from https://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF
Lanier, J. (2010). You are not a gadget: A manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Partnership for 21st Century Learning. (n.d.). Retrieved June 07, 2016, from http://www.p21.org/
Singer, T. W. (2015, July 29). Using Twitter to Enhance Professional Learning. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from http://connection.sagepub.com/blog/sage-connection/2015/07/29/using-twitter-to-enhance-professional-learning/
Singer, T. W. (2015, July 14). Should Twitter Replace Professional Development? Retrieved June 07, 2016, from http://connection.sagepub.com/blog/sage-connection/2015/07/14/should-twitter-replace-professional-development/
Singer, T. W. (2015, July 14). The Pros and Cons of Twitter for Professional Learning. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from http://connection.sagepub.com/blog/sage-connection/2015/07/22/the-pros-and-cons-of-twitter-for-professional-learning/?hootPostID=f2b4f740d4509bfb6fcf78ca1bf44b5f
Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. S.l.: Harvard University Press.
Vygotskiĭ, L. S., & Cole, M. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
New literacies. (n.d.). Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_literacies
D.School. (n.d.). Bootcamp Bootleg. Retrieved June 7, 2016, from https://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/BootcampBootleg2010v2SLIM.pdf
DSchool. (n.d.). Improv Toolkit for Educators. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/f8fb7/Improv_Toolkit_for_Educators.html
DSchool. (n.d.). Improv Toolkit for Educators. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/f8fb7/Improv_Toolkit_for_Educators.html
DSchool. (n.d.). Improv activities for Design Thinking. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/3091c/Improv_activities_for_Design_Thinking.html
