Contextualize This

Back in 2008, after a casual conversation about his work, a friend who'd helped draw up the MacArthur Foundation's report Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the Twenty-First Century directed me to a copy on the web. I downloaded and read the whole thing ("Uh, you realize that you just assigned yourself homework and did it, right?" pointed out my roommate), and proceeded to draft a long e-mail response. Opportunities for students to learn by studying across disciplines, creating media, playing games...technology wouldn't be ultimate enabler of these changes to our educational system, I argued. A set of skilled teachers could do all this and more in a perfectly low-tech school. What had to change was the system itself; deep changes in incentive structures, school cultures, expectations about the purposes education serves. (My friend responded with a shrug and the remark, "Yeah, that was basically all the stuff they made us cut out.")

That tension came to mind for me again this week as I considered the use of mobile technologies for children. Such technologies are often touted because they remove children's technology experience from the confines of a desktop PC, thereby increasing participation and engagement. It nevertheless strikes me that the same result could be achieved with much less technology and more imagination. For instance, a project called Ambient Wood encouraged children to collect data about a forest environment using mobile devices. While this sounds enjoyable and informative, it seems to me that the data collection could have occurred using lower-tech tools (a standard thermometer, for instance) and still been equally fun for the kids, especially if it were cleverly structured as a game.

School systems need more hands-on, real-world challenges like the one students faced in the Ambient Wood project; in the current high-stakes testing climate, this isn't often what students are offered. Technology can and should be a part of these challenges, but in itself, technology won't bring about educational innovation. Far more important will be the insight and creativity with which educators design and use mobile and other technological tools.

Why The Internet Is Like Memory Foam

In his article "Toward a Cognitive Developmental Approach to Youth Perceptions of Credibility," Matthew Eastin highlights some of the research on how adults and children evaluate online sites and sources as credible. A series of factors come into play: the reputed credibility of the source, reactions to its outward appearance or design, culturally based assumptions, etc.

Unfortunately, distinguishing content from advertising on the web is a constantly changing proposition. Consider, for example, phenomena such as blogs that may appear to be homespun but are in fact sponsored by interested parties; or the recent announcement by Twitter that soon, "promoted" tweets will be interspersed with regular tweets when a user enters a term into Twitter's search engine.

Increasingly, the dynamic social web is creating scenarios in which companies can harvest personal information to target their advertising campaigns with unsettling specificity. One study found that statistical analysis of a Facebook user's friend network could determine with 78% accuracy whether the profile belonged to a gay male. A site like Mint.com uses its customers' financial data to suggest appropriate financial products; is this content or advertising?

The web is like memory foam because more and more, it "remembers" what we put into it for later visits. That is why efforts to educate users to better assess source credibility must, increasingly, take into account not just what the site has presented, but what the user has put in. Internet users, young and old, must not just ask what source's agenda might be, but, "What does this source know about me?" Often the answer is far from clear. And young users must come to understand that unguarded sharing of their personal data leaves it vulnerable to exploitation by marketers. In short, credibility and privacy are increasingly entangled considerations.

The Hidden Side of E-Learning?

In discussions of online schooling, one of the less frequently addressed sectors is that of corporate training. This is not terribly surprising; for-profit organizations have significant incentives to keep their employee training practices and knowledge-sharing systems confidential.

But it's a shame we don't know more about corporate training, for a few reasons. First, the corporate sector tends to be highly results-oriented. While traditional institutions of higher learning tend to adopt a broader vision of the purpose of schooling, for-profit organizations tend to push for direct, documentable results from e-learning initiatives. Second, the corporate sector affords great opportunities for embedded, authentic learning. Legitimate peripheral participation is an often difficult type of learning to achieve in the classroom, but on-the-job training affords rich opportunities for such learning, and it would be interesting to see how companies may be making use of technological tools to enhance it. Finally, the corporate sector may be seen as a potentially cautionary tale. As researchers like Barbour and Reeves have noted, many of the reported benefits of virtual K-12 education are anecdotal rather than based on rigorous research. Similarly, some observers have begun to argue that the corporate e-learning sector has grown stagnant or ineffective, even as investment in it continues to rise (see http://linehive.com/show/229).

All of this is not to say that what works in a virtual corporate training program will necessarily work in a college or high school. But greater transparency in corporate training could be valuable in the ongoing development of larger-scale e-learning initiatives.