Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.29.10 | School districts demand assessment tools for 21st-century skills; Ewan McIntosh on technology and education in South Africa; An online shopping site turns to its teen interns for advice; What Facebook tells researchers about friendship and race; and what educators can learn from the Facebook movie.

DML Proposals Due: Interested in presenting at the 2011 Digital Media & Learning Conference? The deadline for proposals has been extended to Friday, Nov. 5. Workshops and panels are organized along these four themes: Youth, Digital Media and Empowerment; Emerging Platforms and Policies; New Collectives; and Digital Media and Participatory Learning.

In the Land Where 90 Percent of Schools Don’t Have the Net: Ewan McIntosh is in South Africa, where he’s visiting schools and covering technology stories from the Microsoft Partners in Learning’s Worldwide Innovative Education Forum. While South Africa “quickly present[s] the digital divide in stark terms,” McIntosh is interested in “how learning from the extremes might offer some inspiration for troubled education systems on the other side of the equator.”

Plus: We began the week talking about classroom design in the United States; in this post, McIntosh talks with Sue Redelinghuys, who heads up Cape Town’s St. Cyprian’s school, which, “feels like it’s worked out how to hothouse creativity and innovation in physical space, without sidelining those working in more traditional areas of the school.” Check out the photos of spaces that encourage engagement and collaboration (more here).

Survey Says: School Districts Demand Assessment Tools, Technology Funding: “Understanding how critical 21st century skills are to student achievement, school districts across the country want the federal government to develop new tools that assess how well children are learning these newly-acquired skills, according to the National School Boards Association (NSBA), a nonprofit organization that represents state associations of school boards and advocates for excellence in public education,” writes Lauren Barack at School Library Journal.

The NSBA recently surveyed its members, and nearly 35 percent of respondents said assessing 21st-century skills—such as problem-solving, teamwork and critical thinking—should be one of the top priorities that Congress and the Obama administration address related to education technology. Funding Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) came in second, followed by supporting/funding the National Education Technology Plan and focusing on STEM subject areas of science, technology, engineering and math.

On the question of the “single biggest challenge facing your school district in the area of technology,” more than 47 percent answered “helping teachers effectively use technology.”

How College Students Use Technology: The 2010 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology has just been released. Audrey Watters over at ReadWriteWeb has a good summary.

Among the key findings [pdf]:

• Over the last four years, desktop ownership has declined by more than 25 percent, while laptop ownership increased by almost as many points; 89 percent of students own either a laptop or netbook.


• Eight out of 10 students consider themselves expert or very skilled in searching the internet effectively and efficiently. More than half (57 percent) rated their ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of online information as expert or very skilled; 48 percent rated their understanding of ethical and legal issues at the same level.


• When it comes to creating and sharing content, 42 percent said they had uploaded video; 40 percent had updated wikis; and 36 percent contributed to blogs. About 25 percent played online multi-user computer games and used social bookmarking/tagging websites.


• More than 96 percent of students use Facebook; MySpace was a distant second with 23 percent. Slightly fewer than 7 percent had not applied any privacy restrictions to their social networking sites, while fewer than 2 percent said they did not know if they had. Four in 10 said they had applied some restrictions, and about half said they put a lot of restrictions on their profiles.


• Only about 30 percent use social networking sites in their courses—although half of those students were using them to collaborate with other students.

What Facebook Tells Researchers About Friendship and Race: Travis Kaya at The Chronicle of Higher Education previews a study on Facebook connections conducted by researchers at Harvard University and the University of California at Los Angeles. A paper on the study will be published next week in the American Journal of Sociology.

Although sociologists have long believed students are drawn together by race, the study suggests they are much more likely to become friends with people they see more often or those who make friendly overtures. “There is a high degree of racial homogeneity in friendship networks, but a lot of it is generated by other ways in which friendships are formed,” said Andreas Wimmer, a professor of sociology at UCLA who led the study.

According to the paper, students were also two and-a-half times more likely to befriend peers from the same state and up to two times more likely to bond over attending an elite prep school than they were to form friendships with people who just shared their racial background. “Race is important in the end,” said Kevin Lewis, a Harvard graduate student who is one of the paper’s authors, “but it’s nowhere near as important as we thought.”

Plus: Lisa Nielsen at the Innovative Educator on four lessons she learned from “The Social Network,” aka The Facebook Movie.

Turning Customers Into Creators: PlumWillow, which runs an online shopping site, isn’t looking to crowdsource its website design, but is relying on a select group of customers to provide feedback and direction—namely, its 15- and 16-year-old interns.

Moving beyond “the old-fashioned focus group and into co-creation with your demographic is something that will happen more in the next couple of years,” Susan Etlinger, a consultant at the Altimeter Group, tells The New York Times. “All business will have to learn how to cope with a new generation of users that are used to their particular experience of the Web.”