Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.3.11 | Technology on the K-12 Horizon; quantifying the benefits of ebooks; the right age for social media; parting with privacy; and permission to remix, creatively ...

Technology on the K-12 Horizon: The New Media Consortium has released its 2011 Horizon Report for K-12 (pdf), an examination of emerging technologies and their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. For more on how this report was created, check out this wiki, featuring input from members of the Horizon K12 Advisory Board.

“Cloud computing” and “mobiles” are listed under the time-to-adoption heading of one year or less. Here’s how mobiles are (loosely) defined:

Mobiles are a category that defies long-term definitions. With more than 1.2 billion new mobile devices produced each year, the pace of innovation in the mobile markets is unprecedented. Mobiles, especially smartphones and tablets, enable ubiquitous access to information, social networks, tools for learning and productivity, and hundreds of thousands of custom applications. Mobiles were listed in previous years because they could capture multimedia, access the Internet, or geolocate. Now they are effectively specialized computers for the palm of your hand, with a huge and growing collection of software tools that make use of their accelerometers, compasses, cameras, microphones, GPS, and other sensors.

Writing at the Huffington Post, Daniel Donahoo reflects on the mobile aspect and what must be done to make the most of technology:

If we choose to simply go one-to-one with these devices and load them eBooks and see them as somehow being devices that save us money and paper and better help us to test and track and analyze data then we will have changed nothing. The Horizon Report demonstrates how these tools can be used creatively: using tablets to sketch self portraits, using iPhones GPS to track tagged birds flight paths and there are tools for story telling and animation that can be used at kindergarten level like the Toontastic app.

Mobile devices will not improve our children’s learning on their own. We need to foster the teaching profession, to learn (at a reasonable pace) how to use and adapt these devices to best support children’s learning. We need teacher’s and facilitators not to feel overwhelmed, but inspired and this means not claiming the technology will save us, but understanding and respecting the context into which this change must occur and the difficulties and challenges of that change.

Are Ebooks Any Good?: Speaking of ebooks, Lisa Guernsey has written an excellent article for School Library Journal on their appeal and potential. The story opens with Julie Hume, an elementary school reading specialist who sets out to determine whether a subscription ebook program called Tumblebooks can help struggling readers

Guernsey, the director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of “Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children from Birth to Age 5,” asks all the right questions, beginning with: “Are electronic picture books good for kids, and can they get them hooked on reading by expanding access to engaging titles? Or are digital books one more step down that slippery slope to less and less interaction with print just when children need it most?”

She notes that investment in ebooks has been slow at the elementary level; only 29 percent of elementary schools have ebooks in their collections, compared to 64 percent of high schools, according to School Library Journal’s 2011 technology survey. But that may be changing: 

What if, however, those drops in the bucket formed a tidal wave? School librarians appear to be bracing for a shift: SLJ’s survey showed that a majority of elementary school librarians said they either will (18 percent) or may (46 percent) purchase ebooks in the next two years. States and school districts are starting to make deals with ebook companies to provide yearly subscriptions to thousands of students at a time. Starting this summer, Iowa’s nine area education agencies will offer access to BookFlix to all accredited schools in the state. Another sign of change comes from Scholastic’s 2010 reading habits survey, which shows that the youngest respondents—six- to eight-year-olds—were more likely than their older counterparts to have read an ebook. That exposure, says Judy Newman, vice president of Scholastic Book Clubs, may reflect the fact that little children have younger parents who may be introducing them to online content at home.

Read the full story here.

How Old is Old Enough for Social Media?: Mark Zuckerberg has suggested he’d like to see Facebook open to kids under age 13—the current minimum age based on federal privacy guidelines. Of course, as we’ve previously noted, millions of pre-adolescents are already on the social network, many with parental permission. Tech expert Mario Armstrong, Annie Feighery, co-founder of the motherhood web site “The Domestic Agenda,” and NPR contributor Leslie Morgan Steiner discussed the topic recently on NPR’s “Tell Me More.”

Steiner says her three kids won’t be permitted to have their own Facebook pages until they are well into their teens, while Feighery takes a different approach, allowing her children, who are also underage, to participate on Facebook, albeit with a timer so they know how much time they’re spending.

“I think people aren’t really realizing that the kids are able to handle this,” says Feighery. “And as was said earlier, they’re good netizens. And beyond that, if you consider that girls, right now, make up less than 10 percent of computer information systems, new hires; as the mother of a daughter who, you know, as a scientist, I really want my daughter to not think the Internet is dangerous.

“Technology is her friends and not only that, technology is an exciting adventure,” she adds. “These are tools for life. You can’t enter the job world that is in front of these children and not know how to be yourself and generally communicate well in 140 characters or less.”

Plus: The Hechinger Report has a Q&A with cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito, who talks about social media usage and access. 

“Facebook is the biggest educational property we have in kids’ lives now,” said Ito, research director at the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine. “I’m not saying it’s educational in the way you want it to be. I’m just saying it’s where they are doing most of their learning.”

Parting With Privacy: The opportunity to share information online is so frequent and routine that most young technology users do so without considering the consequences, reports Cecilia Kang in The Washington Post. Actually, that sounds like most adults, too. Still, adolescent development experts say teenagers need special consideration.

“Their ability to make decisions is still forming and clearly different from that of adults,” said Kathryn Montgomery, a privacy advocate and communications professor at American University.

The new challenge is with mobile phones, which are frequently used by teens go access the internet. Privacy policies for apps can be particularly hard to find or unclear.

YouTube Gets Creative: When not on Facebook or smartphones, more teens are making and remixing videos to share with friends and classmates. Now, to the relief of teachers everywhere, YouTube has made it easier to share, post and re-edit videos without fear of violating copyright law. It announced this week that a Creative Commons library is now available through the YouTube Video Editor.

“We’re working with organizations like C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, Al Jazeera and others, so that over 10,000 Creative Commons videos are available for your creative use,” writes Stace Peterson, a software engineer at YouTube, said in the blog post.

With this amount of content, rainy days during summer vacation may be more welcomed.