Texting & Better Language Skills

Just learned that a study in Britain has found that there is a positive association between how many “textisms” (SMS abbreviations) that 10- 12-year-old students use and the children’s word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness measures...sample size of 88 children but significant findings nonetheless.

Plester, B., Wood, C., Joshi, P., (2009), Exploring the relationship between children's knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27, 1, 145-161.

I am currently working on a paper/design that attempts to put this part of the "shift" into practice...

Digital Kids-- Redefining School

PBWiki- Assessing Collaboration

PBwiki became PBworks today. If you're using wikis in your learning environment, you probably know about PBwiki already.

Wikis come closer than any other platform for developing constructivist learning opportunities as the strength of a wiki is always in its connections to other information. For the classroom, I think the strength of the wiki is in its capacity to assess collaboration. Collaboration can be assessed qualitatively and quantitatively with a clarity that is difficult to develop in curriculum.

Cognitive Transfer & Learning-- take 'er slow

Dan Schwartz gave a great talk to the NU engineering faculty (and a few of us LS folks) yesterday on knowledge transfer. He highlighted the naive belief that efficiency works in education. He suggested that this was particularly so in the U.S. where we define success often by the degree of efficiency (low variability, high accuracy, and rapid); e.g. tests are often timed (the SAT, etc.) and we're obsessed with Piagetian stages relative to our eastern counterparts.

He claims:

• We must distinguish between different types of expertise; e.g. routine expertise:high level of efficiency at a recurrent task or adaptive expertise: capacity to transfer information across diverse contexts. Any superintendent or business exec with his/her head outta the sand understands the costs involved in training, and that exec also understands the tomorrow will not have the same needs as today, so the need for adaptive expertise has never been greater...
• No "master" (e.g. Mozart, etc.) made any significant contribution to his/her field without ten years of experience.
• The stigma of inefficient learners prevents us from innovating and re-structuring our mental models; i.e. any time we innovate we will appear worse for a while (e.g. Tiger Woods took a year off to re-work his stroke).
• Homework vs. hobby dichotomy: homework is motivated by punishment and by belief of increased satisfaction; while, hobbies are motivated by perceived gradual improvement.
• Adaptive expertise derives from 1. Knowledge of general principles, skills, etc. & 2. Knowledge of contexts to which they apply. (Typically, we teach students 1 but not 2).
• Surface features are very important for retention/recall. If we teach concepts more abstractly they will transfer better because surface features are minimized. (Stop telling students what steps to take as they simple focus on the steps; instead, discuss the concepts required to complete them).
• For students to develop adaptive expertise and the ability to learn across environments we need to develop their deep cognitive structures.

Wired magazine's article on memory and Jill Price is an excellent image of current efforts to reform curriculum. Price's amazing memory is not a result of any anatomical difference; rather, her ability to remember every specific of her past is a result of an extensive self-constructed knowledge system with connections that are regularly reinforced.

As students and teachers, we should remember that the patterns and connections between the ideas that we learn and teach are far more important than the individual ideas.

Instructional Response to New Literacies

Literacy is a social practice-- we should teach it as one!

As a society, we have focused on linguistic elements of literacy for a long period of time probably because linguistic evolution was occurring so rapidly as a response to rapidly increasing populations that were interacting at unprecedented levels. Lewis and Fabos suggest that we are moving to a design orientation to literacies now, and perhaps this is a response to the evolution of design potential afforded by multimodal technological tools across populations? Such thinking follows Lankshear & Knobel’s (2003) suggestion that new literacies result in new production practices relating to producing, consuming, and representing knowledge. Too often we focus on the technological tool and not the practice that that tool develops. This could be a symptom of rapidly evolving technology and the inevitable uncertainty that arises with it; however, we need a framework for understanding technology in instruction. Essential questions like why do some types of text engage you need to be examined for students for students to be effectively employ their repertoire of skills.

This movement to a meta discussion about literacy instruction is also important for the likely evolution of literacy in our students’ worlds. The amount of time students are actually engaged with in-school literacy activities will certainly become less and less. The evident discrepancy between current in and out of school literacies will only increase if we do not move literacy instruction to a “meta” level as Lewis and Fabos suggest. Their practical suggestions for moving instruction provide realistic questions that should be posed to anyone trying to teach students about voice, style, narrative tension, flow, etc.

Responding to Modern Literacies

How can organizations (not just schools) respond to new literacies?

New literacies shifts our mindset in a few ways...

Bookspace to Cyberspace
Published to Participatory*
Individuated to Collaborative
Author-centric to Distributed
Expert-oriented to Collective Intelligence

*The battle to define Web 2.0 has been great...After the dust settles, I anticipate web 2.0 being defined by one word, PARTICIPATION.

Our organizations may respond to modern literacy by:

• Increasing focus on collectives as the unit of production.
• Distributing expertise/authority.
• Creating open/fluid collective spaces.
• Fostering relations in emerging digital media spaces.

The Microsoft school reflected some of these design considerations in 2006, but most promising is the development of the thousands of inexpensive collaboration apps that enable all organizations to respond effectively.

Digital Literacies

Post-structuralist language theory guides any discussion of literacy today. The forms literacy occupies continue evolve. Loaded words like "multi modal" offer a nod to the complexity of our current state. The days of structural pedantic grammar are relatively simple in complexity compared to today's media rich world. The socially recognized ways of communicating continue to expand. How do we teach a discourse that continues to be ever more broadly understood?

I think we should begin to think about literacies as "socially evolved and patterned activities" that are particular to certain contexts. Our teaching should probably be an examination of these contexts rather than a memorization activity. Any literacy calls us to generate and communicate meaning, and this meaning is only understood within a specific context. Curriculums should guide students sense making. If we do that, I think the meaning for our students will be clear.

The literacies that dominate today are different than the expert dominated literacies of the past. Today's literacy is more participatory, collaborative, and distributed than anything we've confronted before. It's more fluid and less abiding than any curriculum has ever tried to teach. If we ground it in the context of the new literacy space which is online and offline we can begin to make sense of the experimentation that defines literacy today.

SNA

In fall 2008, I was lucky enough to enroll in a Social Network Analysis course. Since then, the network perspective has stuck w/ me, and I have found my self wondering where an idea exists in a network and how it might/ or might not change within the network.

I applied my SNA course work to my work in the cognitive science foundations in my final paper where I discussed professional development from a network perspective. (I'll link the paper shortly).

Ideas never exist in a vacum (we're social creatures after all), so it only makes intuitive sense to study the social context of those ideas. SNA does provides the medium for us to understand this context. We used Pajek, a free SNA software, with data that NU had already collected. Data collection is mind numbingly complex, but the central concepts of SNA can be understood by simply manipulating the data.

For teaching, SNA says:

• Weak ties are important: Innovation usually happens when we interact with those that are not clones of ourselves.
• Strong ties are important too: The sense of community that stems from strong ties is important for sharing ideas, i.e. learning.

So...not much of a suprise here...organizations need to balance. I suppose balancing is what makes great leaders and organizations great.

Karl Fisch discusses Personal Learning Networks here.