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Category Archives: Digital Literacy

LLED 565D – Week 8

Here is One Laptop Per Child* according to American media: One Laptop Per Child on 60 Minutes – Thanks for the “cadre of geeks” comments, Lesley, really selling the idea of digital literacy :-S

*Terms and conditions apply: for residents of the United States and Canada, just holding one of these green-and-white computer will stigmatize you, your family and reflect poorly on your school. Other children will have something fancier, be able to do more things on their portable devices and look cool while doing it. Besides, who uses laptops anymore? It is an unfortunate thing that this otherwise noble and egalitarian operating system will face its greatest challenge in the free market nearly cornered by Apple iPads (which unlike the OLPC, are less durable and will eventually be obsolete in four years). The OLCP website contains mostly photo images with brief, caption-sized stories about what they can do, how they are a boon to under-privileged children in hard-luck schools. There are hyperlinks to blog posts, and for the Walmart shoppers news of the XO Tablet appears to top the list. It is an engine for social justice, and this is perhaps its biggest drawback for countries still promoting the American dream, something affordable and “ambitious” as the OLPC gets looked down upon: proof that not enough dreamers are living up to the nation’s potential of becoming rockstar presidents (or in Canada, I dunno, an athlete who gets traded to an American team?). This is the main reason why the digital divide persists.

With the small print out of the way, I admire the innovation and simplicity of design the One Laptop represents. Along the same humanitarian reach of Hole in the Wall and other programs to increase computer exposure to children. Their website lets the pictures do the talking, great for children seeking the inspiration to get connected. The 60 Minutes video does a soft sell of its potential to at least level the playing field in countries where poverty, lack of infrastructure and challenging climate conditions pose a threat to average computers. One of the most intriguing aspects of these laptops is the button that let’s the child see the code for any of the screens they are looking at, enabling children to explore and experiment with the behind-the-curtain aspects of computing. On the OLPC wiki, there is a page on constructionism, citing a few familiar theorists (otherwise known as constructist like Piaget, Vygotsky and Papiert) and the belief that children working together will create social change. Of course, leave it to the adults to mess things up, as 60 Minutes close their report (or at least this segment) on Intel’s attempt to undercut OLPC’s altruism, but perhaps with more netizens worldwide, The Man will have less of a deterimental effect on digital connectivity.

One way to measure the level of success is to hear from the children themselves, rather than the designers and educators speak its praises: here is one child in Bhutan answering his teacher’s questions, but it won’t be long before they are demonstrating their own ideas. I like that LEGO and Stratch have teamed up with the One Laptop, and look forward to seeing more from around the world.


Bhutan olpc video 2013

LLED 565D – Week 7?

Here I am again, and it turns out to keep on track with other classes for the rest of the week (both of them had last week off for reading week) I will simply label this post as Week 7 again, despite not having to post anything on the UBC Connect site for this current week. Author Cynthia Nugent will be a guest speaker for today’s class, and I can also post a link to the the class wiki (link coming soon) on rating DL apps for the somewhat shiny new iPad Minis that belong to the Digital Literacy Centre.

LLED 565D – Week 7

Guy Merchant strikes again, and instead of posting my reflection on his virtual world research (Merchant, 2009), I made a brief video that captures some of the points he raises, but also connects one of my projects from my Master of Educational Technology program from 2010 to 2012.


YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcbKui_L39Q

And here is the venture pitch for the Virtual Globe 3.0 that I recorded a few years back, with a link to the UBC blog where it was posted. Now that I am inspired by Guy Merchant (again) I really want to start making this virtual project a reality.

UBC Blogs: ETEC 522: Virtual Globe 3.0

Since the dodgy website doesn’t always have the videos embedded, it looks like I will have to start over with a new model for performing Shakespeare in a virtual space. Look forward to more on this topic in the coming weeks.

LLED 565D – Week 6

Family Day – no class

LLED 565D – Week 5

There is much research work that still needs to be done on understanding how young children make meaning with computers and other digital devices, and Australian Christina Davidson sets out to demonstrate how ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can be effectively used to show what children know. She uses Jefferson’s transcript notation, and what gets printed in this article is just the tip of the iceberg from pages of notes, based on hours of video footage. Part of me feels as if this way of doing research will capture every nuance of a child’s on-line (and off-line) interactions with information: the tone of voice, the gasps and moments between speaking. Each moment is videotaped, yet still needs to be unpacked of meaning, therefore a good proportion of Davidson’s research paper is setting up the situation, presenting it with Jefferson’s notation and then discussing what it means. It becomes a tedious process, and rather than letting the child’s words speak for themself, there is this triple underlining of mundane details, such as Matt’s Google search of an image he already has in a book at home. Like trying to watch a flower bloom, this child’s discovery will take time and adults should be wary of trying to speed up the process. Each moment may reveal a unique perspective on what the child already knows, and what is being discovered. It still remains an emotionless retelling, and the reader must supply what is going on inside the child’s mind during each step of the recorded activity. There does not seem to be any notation for the internalization process, although Davidson eventually refers to Vygotsky’s concept of “self-talk” in her discussion on what happened.

Much Ado About Notation: “Oh that she were here to write me down an ass!”

While I cannot say I was won over by the transcription process, even as conversation analysis seems to be the close cousin to discourse analysis: both are concerned with who said what, yet most forms of discourse analysis seems to go deeper into why things are said rather than how they are uttered. The researcher is still not reading the participant’s mind, but there is still a sense than both are taking part in the conversation instead of the researcher timing the gaps between syllables. A third and more direct way of representing research is narrative inquiry, where the conversation between participants and researchers is represented as a dialogue, closely matching what gets written up as a play’s script. There is still ways of indicating pauses and half-formed phrases, but it can cleverly include inner thoughts and reflection. None of these reporting methods will truly capture the moment as it happened, but then even the video camera can only catch so much. It comes down to the researchers making the final call, based on all the theory and related practice that have been part of their studies. Essentially, this academic intuition is the best way to judge whether a child understands something new or not – and in the end it is simply an educated guess. In this case, Matt realizes that the web image of green basilisk lizard was one that he already looked, based upon the highlighted text in list of Google hits. Here is how I would write up the same scene (Excerpt 4) with narrative inquiry.

The white screen lights up Matt’s face, and his eyes scan the list of search results.

MATT: Hey, I’ve seen this one before. (clicks on the first listed website) It’s cool…

As soon as the desired image appears on the screen, his hand manipulates the mouse.

MATT: Look… on that picture. (presses the screen with his finger)

RESEARCHER: Wow…

MATT: it’s running on water. (scrolls down the rest of the page) Well, I am actually making a lizard book and this might be a good one for it.

He clicks on the first image and it soon fills the screen.

MATT: I’ll mke it bigger, a bit.

It is not exactly Shakespeare, but I feel captures the moment as reported by Davidson while giving the reader some mental space to interpret what is happening. The question that immediately leaps to mind is how this five and half year old child knows how to make a lizard book using web resources such as a Google search engine. Davidson research builds up to the point of answering the question: will Matt find the image he is looking for? and narrates an overly familiar situation but leaves it at that. Engaging research needs to work beyond this point of reporting.

LLED 565D – Week 4

The article I read for this week’s class is Gutnick, Robb, Takeuchi and Kotler’s 2011 report Always connected: The new digital media habits of young children published by the Sesame Workshop and Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the same organizations working toward literacy projects in West Africa, as in the attached video. No surprise that there are muppets involved, as Joan G. Cooney was one of the co-creators of Sesame Street back in 1969. Many of us growing up in North America will have fond memories of the alphabet, early numeracy and pop culture references thanks to the long-running television show. The extensive study of children (mostly age 0-11) and their media consumption habits reveals that television is still the predominant electronic media form, which must have come as a relief to Public Broadcasters. It should be noted too that most of the data collected was as current as 2010, and there are several references to iPads and other tablets, yet nothing in the data to reflect the tablet’s role in accessing media. I also have the sense that video-on-demand and Internet-based channels (at the time of this report, Netflix was transitioning from mailing rental DVD to web-streaming video). Another report will soon clear up these subtle changes, and who knows how children will be connected to media at that point in history! It is good to see that paper-bound books are still considered a source of media outside of schools.

One troubling aspect of the report comes in at the middle section, starting with page 22 and the section titled “Finding 3: digital divides still exist, in both access to and usage of media” where a number of the studies reveal the differences between socio-economic status and broadly-defined racial groups, in this case black, white and Hispanic. As much as the United States holds onto the “melting pot” theory of cultural assimilation, certainly there is something a little off with these three categories: how is Hispanic a colour? Where do Asian-American and Indigenous people fit in? If the cultural difference are reduced to black and white, is Hispanic the new black? Or the new white? It was hard to take most of these findings seriously, as they seemed to imply the very limited nature of social change towards historically disadvantaged groups. The status quo remains the same, much in the same way as television continues as the number one media source for American children.

From the outset of the Always connected report, the authors state that they are viewing the results as a neutral party (p.7) it is no doubt in the interest of television producers, PBS and commercial alike, that the TV set stay switched on, even when there is nobody in the room to watch it. Parts of this report do warrent particualr attention from parents and educators alike, but it was hard to grasp who should heed the message about the media. Much of the studies cited in this paper are scholarly, but more come from either JGC or Sesame Workshop publications. Last weekend, I picked up a copy of the slightly more academic Simon and Nemeth’s 2012 Digital decision: Choosing the right technology tools for early education education, and I have yet to decide whether it is for educators or deep-pocketed parents. The old adage says not to judge a book by its cover!

By strange coincidence, today marks the start of the Oreo “crazy flavors” campaign, and it seem to better capture the multicultural blending of society that Sesame Street originally intended.

LLED 565D – Week 3

Taking a huge step back in time, the early eighties, to mind map the discussion on the digital age according to Jackie Marsh (2010) and David Buckingham (2009). Like much of the technology used today to create it, there was more certainty with the simpler aspects of virtual gaming world a few decades ago.

Here is a link to my Prezi: http://prezi.com/jvy86ebfhqrn/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

Since none of my embedded files are uploading on this worn-out laptop!

LLED 565D – Week 2

The two readings selected for this week examine a question very close to my concerns over the children growing up digital, whether the technology that surrounds them at school and at home makes them into a different type of learner than what is described in many scholarly research. With a fondness for Vygotsky and the cognitive psychologists so influential to my early educational studies, I am inclined to say there is no great difference between what children were able to do prior to on-line interaction and now. They simply have abilities to use tools, modeled by their parents and peers, and will continue their development into higher mental functions the more they internalize use of such tools. Virtual worlds such as Club Penguin or Minecraft will enhance the imaginative or “figured world” (Holland et al, 1998) that include many of the same types of play that could be found in living rooms and playgrounds. It is still nice to have data that backs up this theory, and therefore looking at Jackie Marsh’s research provides some quantitative evidence alongside her qualitative study of primary grade students who use virtual social media sites.

Pre-Disney Club Penguin

My first encounter with one of her studied website, Club Penguin happened on my practicum, where laptop computer cart would be wheeled into the classroom so that the grade four students could work together on a social studies wiki I had designed. Those who finished the tasks early usually demanded free-time, and I became interested to see what the students could do independently with monitored access to the Internet. Most of the time, students would fuss over their log in name (or forgotten passwords) but once in the game showed a high level of compitence. As Marsh points out, most of the collaborative gaming happened between friends already in the classroom – usually one student asking another to join them in a particular chatroom or on-line activity. For most of the girls in the class, there was the cuteness factor of raising “puffers” and the boys seemed to enjoy the sledding and skiing activities, plus both girls and boys would gleefully engage in a snowball fight with whomever was on-line at the time. A benign game, as far as I can tell, and not so much under the influence of Disney cross-promotional marketing (users can now access Avengers penguins, based on the Disney-owned Marvel film franchise, are penguin princesses far behind?) that was promoted as the safest on-line site for children. Marsh investigates more thoroughly the possibilities of student interaction and cultural capital of both Club Penguin and Barbie Girls. Her conclusion, like many others investigating this field, is that more research needs to be conducted, and I would happily like to add my final project for LLED 558: Multimodalities and Literacy, once it is in a more publishable form!

Another American agency monitoring
21st century learners and educators!

Following Marsh’s engaging research, I decided to investigate one of the major professional organizations listed on the course outline, hoping to uncover some digital literacy gems for local Early Childcare Education professionals (such as my wife) but surprised to find most were American agencies. It is not such a surprise, at the PhD level, to encounter more information on education in the United States (even with my Master in Educational Technology, much of the latest trends seemed to be coming up from south of the border). The only international website (ISTE) linked me to a stub, one of those message pages that indicate the page could not be found, yet on further investigation, located the Standards for Teachers page, which like much at in the field of education (including the very department I got my master degree from) had gone through a process of rebranding to keep up to date with Web 2.0 changes. As for the document itself, Advancing Digital Age Teaching, it seems to be well thought-out and includes many buzz-worthy words and phrases (such as innovate, technology-enhanced learning environment and engage) that share a positive outlook on the future of teaching children younger than the ones Jackie Marsh. Yet while presenting a open-ended guideline for the qualities administrators want to promote with the educators they will hire (and possibly fire for not meeting their expectations), I can already hear the cry of complaint: “what do they really expect us to do?” One sticking point in particular is the respect for copyright nicely tucked into the second page of the document. Education 1.0 already features copious pages of photocopied material, some of it falling within the legally permitted 10%, and the occasional teacher playing a DVD or video for the class, skipping over the explicit warning that this video is not for public viewing (usually home use only). It is this mindset that produced the document on Education 2.0, I strongly argue, and it seems a bit more rethinking of values such as copyright is in order to make education truly relevant for 21st century citizens.

LLED 565D – Week 1

I will re-post my second week reflection, wrongly place on the discussion thread for last week, later tonight. Here I want to answer the questions asked about the the survey. Firstly, there is that law, closely related to Murphy’s, where anything that can go wrong will, and it is especially true of digital technology used in front of other people. How many classes have been stalled by a YouTube video not loading or a device taking forever to buffer, and these are the tools that have worked perfectly fine just moments before being brought into the classroom? It almost seems like it has to be a trial by fire (either that or the technology has a mind of its own) to get digital literacy into young children’s education.

All of this to say that in taking the Survey Monkey questionnaire in class, we should almost expect technical difficulties. This was a very familiar experience for me, having lots of electronic fits and starts in my on-line Master of Educational Technology program. The calming and upbeat answer is that kids don’t get so worked up over computers, smartphones or whatevers not working. In fact, most of them seem capable of working around these glitches, rather than my determined, digital immigrant way of repeatedly doing the same thing until something works – how many times will I need to repost before I get it right? Otherwise, the survey gave me and my team (Danielle and Hedy) plenty to discuss while we tapped away on our screens, waiting to submit our collective results.

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