The App Generation

After reading Gardner’s book The App Generation, I learned a lot about my student’s generation and how apps change their culture, intimacy, and thinking.  Students growing up with apps tend to view life through the lens of an app.  They map out their lives with little to no flexibility for change.  Even though social medial has its hand in every aspect of life and the ability to make social connections has never been easier, the app generation feels lonely.  They feel pressure to maintain a digital social life while a physical one is lacking.  The young generation is uncomfortable with, in person, intimate conversation or conflict.  They are more comfortable expressing deep feelings through a digital medium.

As an Arts teacher I was disturbed by the lack of creative thinking in this generation.  Gardner attributed it to a couple different scenarios.  One being students use apps to create and they do not think outside of the app.  If a student wants to create a work with a specific hue of pink and it does not exist in the app they are limited. Or, if a student is creating a musical work and has specific timbre and the app doesn’t have they are boxed in by what the app can do.  Another reason student may not be as creative is they do not have mental downtime or time to be bored.  There is always a device to entertain.  Gardner says that boredom and daydreaming are good for the brain. Daydream allows one to think beyond their consciousness and helps the creative mind.

Teaching good brainstorming techniques, the creative process, then teaching students how to do their own affordance analysis will allow them to think outside the app.  The app is a tool to achieve a goal.  We must have a goal in mind before opening the app.  Gardner studied people from middle class and up.  I wonder if the results would have been different if he used children from poverty to lower middle class.

Net Smart

Net Smart is a how-to-guide for net users.  Rheingold makes the internet user more conscious of their mind on the web by sorting use into 5 categories: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (AKA crap detection), and network smarts.  Attention is about metacognition.  According to Rheingold, “Well sustained attention requires premeditation”. Since there is no way for users to consume all the information available, users need to focus thought on a given task, not be distracted, and avoid multitasking.  Meditation can help strengthen attention by allowing thoughts to flee then focusing on breath to bring them back.

Participation and collaboration addresses participatory culture online. Almost everyone has a device that allows them to participate in a social network.  It is important to be cautious of digital footprint because it is permanent.  It is also important to be aware of social norms in online communities.  Social medial can amplify collaboration.   Collaboration through digital media network can increase social capital, help users gain knowledge, and allow people to achieve common goals.

Much of this book parallels The Information Diet.  I really enjoyed reading the neuroscientific points of view and like the author didn't vilify social media.  I will work to teach digital citizenship and caution my students when using digital and social media but continue to discuss its importance.  Students need to learn to have their crap detectors turned on and focus on the task at hand, avoiding distractions and multitasking.

Copyright Clarity

Rene Hobbs dispels misinformation and fear of copyright laws and breaks down fair use in her book Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning.  She breaks down information participants into: users, creators, and publishers.  Copyright laws are in place to protect the creator’s and publisher’s intellectual property.  Fair Use is the legal use of created material without paying or asking for permission.  Fair use allows users to use works with the purpose of education, commentary, news reporting, and scholarship.  Fair use is based in transformativeness.  Transformativness is when people create new ideas from old ones.  If we cannot repurpose old ideas, then new ideas won’t be created. 

The determination of Fair Use is an informal determination.  Since Copyright Laws are flexible and not concrete, each case of Fair Use is different. Decisions are be made on a case by case basis.  Some questions one should ask before using intellectual property:

Am I creating a new audience?

Am I creating a new interpretation?

Am I creating a new Market?

Is the work being repurposed?

What’s the nature of the work?

This book is an eye opener for me.  There have been many times as a musician and an educator that I was told or warned that I was breaking copyright law.  I know have a better understanding of copyright. In my teaching and professional work, I will examine each piece of copyrighted material without fear and determine if can be used.  I will also work to dispel much of the misinformation out there about Fair Use.  I want my students and colleagues to maintain their creative ideas without the fear of prosecution.

The Information Diet

This is a great book that compares information usage to food.  Today there exist an abundance of cheap food caused by the industrialization of the food industry.  This cheap manufactured food is overconsumed and a cause of the obesity epidemic.  The author states the best and most simple food diet is “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly Plants”.  This overconsumption of what I like to refer to as “crap” mirrors information consumption.  Information is industrialized into “information farms”.  It is no longer fact checked and we get it far from its source.  It is abundant, everywhere, and can cause one to be unhealthy.  A good information diet can be stated as simple as the nutrition diet.  “Read.  Not too much.  Mostly facts”.

I have some poor information consuming habits that I am now changing.  Last week I was watching a football game.  I had my laptop on my lap preparing to do schoolwork during commercial breaks.  I also had my cellphone in my hand scrolling social media.  That’s 3 devices streaming information!  I was binge consuming.  None of it of substance but highly addictive.  Once I realized what was happening.  I turned my phone off and put the computer to my side with the purpose of picking it up to work during breaks in the game.  Not having my devices made me uncomfortable.  Just focusing on television wasn’t enough to satisfy.  I needed multiple sources of information.  It was all crap. 

In the classroom we need to not only give students healthy factual information but we need to teach them how to consume healthy information themselves.  With the abundance of crap available, students need to be able to search for information they need. Then sort the quality information, sifting the crap out.   Then synthesize the information into its summary.  Building good information habits in students is vital to having a healthy society.

The Creative Spirit and The Sixth Design Principle

The Creative Spirit is written to help instructional designers be creation minded and help achieve high quality and flexible instruction to achieve their goals. The Author describes 3 characteristics: Imagination - exploring the unknown or unrealized, Creation Oriented – Tinkering and pushing boundaries, and Inter Disciplinary Action – Collaborating with others and getting a different perspective.  I think being creative is messy and sometimes chaotic process for designers and learners.  There is a certain amount of personal risk one takes to put themselves into the unknown.    

As a music teacher this article struck a chord with me (pun intended).  I teach on a six-day cycle. Which means I must teach the same lesson or concepts six days in a row.  This scheduling is a double-edged sword.   On one side I could have six days of frustration, wasted time, boredom, and a lack of learning if I do not create a well-designed effective lesson.   On the other side the schedule gives me time to fix, abandon, or change a lesson.  I can tweak and reflect on instruction and lesson design to help me learn to improve my practice.  Students as designers need that time as well.  To me, having a creative spirit isn’t something that just occurs during the design conception.  It must be present during implementation and past the final product to reflection.

The Means Principle

“Good learning designs reflect technologies chosen after mindful consideration of the cognitive and societal consequences as well as a clear and appropriate connection with content and learning activities.”

The 5^th design principle brought us the Affordance Analysis.  This gives us a means to assess technologies available and to choose the most appropriate for learning goals.  It also gives us the ability to properly assess new technology and make a calculated decision whether to acquire it or not.  Teaching in the 21^st Century and having a large variety of tools to use in the classroom is nice but it can be difficult choosing the most appropriate for a task.  Each tool dictates how students will work. For example, if you give an assignment with a word processor students will know to work independently but make it a google document and then it becomes collaboration or has share-ability.  The tool has to match the goal.

In class we observed two technologies, the Osmo and Ozobot. At first the Osmo seemed like a wonderful and useful piece of technology.  It had a nice interface with bright colors and fun games.  It seemed really cool! After analyzing its usefulness we came to the conclusion that pieces of cut out paper offered the same affordance at a fraction of cost.  The Ozobot on the other hand had many uses in the classroom but it wasn’t apparent until the analysis of its affordance.

Choosing the tool hasn’t been something I’ve placed an emphasis on.  It also hasn’t been the topic of any conversation, coursework, or professional development I’ve had since becoming an educator.  As I design future lessons I will use Affordance Analysis to choose the tools used to help reach learning goals.  

The Victorian Internet

This week we read and discussed the Victorian Internet.  The book tells the story of the telegraph.  How it evolved from the use of visual signals, to an electrical current passed through a wire, which was ultimately replaced by the telephone.  The telegraphed changed the world.  It made it much smaller.  Information that took weeks or even months could be transmitted almost instantly.  The network of wires that composed the telegraph network has many parallels to the modern internet.

My biggest takeaway from the reading is that new technology has consequences.  It is a neutral tool but human nature remains the same.  It seems that with any new tool it isn’t utilized to its full capabilities.  Once created society doesn’t embrace the change the tool prohibits.  Once embraced many sectors become dependent while other folks exploit it.  New tools create unintended situations or sequences.  As educators, we need to be aware of this when using tools with our designs.