TGIF on Facebook

What do you do on a Friday evening? Visit your friends? Yes - according to research by Buddy Media Friday evening is the time when most people visit their friends, and do a bit of shopping - on Facebook that is. Commercial Facebook use is up by 18% on Friday evening. During normal work hours commercial messages via Twitter and Facebook receive less attention. I wonder why this is news actually - it seems a no-brainer. Especially when your supervisor is one of your virtual 'friends', you should be careful not to use social media during work hours. Big Brother may be watching you, and use it against you. And she would be right to do so as well, at least according to a study by IT research company Nucleus Research, which shows that companies that allow users to access Facebook in the workplace lose an average of 1.5% in total employee productivity. The survey of 237 employees also showed that 77% of workers who have a Facebook account use it during work hours. Interestingly enough some studies show the opposite to be true. A University of Melbourne study shows that as many as 9% workers who indulge in such (Facebook or Twitter) activity have better productivity than those who don’t. The study involved 300 workers and 70% of those engaged in workplace Internet leisure browsing. It’s author, Brent Coker stated: Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days’ work, and as a result, increased productivity. So a bit of couch potato surfing on Facebook is the new smoke break, which is great news for the non-smokers among us.

Real horror and virtual shooting games

Yesterday 24-year old Tristan van der Vlis, armed with a machine gun, entered a crowded shopping mall and started shooting. Six people died during the ten minute killing spree, dozens wounded. Looking at the way he prepared himself and the time he took (ten minutes of non-stop shooting!), one can assume that he was out to hit as many targets as possible - and perhaps it's a miracle that he did not make more casualties. As a member of a shooting club, he must have known that he was technically capable of doing this. At the same time he must have possessed the EQ of a fridge, shutting himself off like this. Did he hate people? Was he bullied in school? Did his relationship fail? Did he lose his job? Was he insane? What should happen for someone to go this far?

Of course this is speculation; it would not surprise me if this madman turns out to have been a game fanatic. The latest shooting games are truly shocking. On a discussion forum, I came across a macabre demo of 'Modern Warfare 2: Terrorist Mission'. You are supposed to identify with the main shooter, because you see everything through his eyes - you are shooting the machine gun; hell, you ARE the shooter. The virtual world looks entirely realistic, it is like watching Mission Impossible. At the CIA headquarters you get your briefing. The message is obvious: you are a GOOD guy, out to get the world's biggest terrorist, called Makarov - yes, a Russian, what else. You have to do whatever it takes - in the end it will benefit the world at large. You soon find out what that means: as an infiltrator, you enter a crowded airport, filled with innocent civilians. As part of Makarov's team, you start shooting up the entire airport. You see people falling down, hear screams, you step over bodies in large pools of blood. You continue to shoot and kill everything that moves. In the ten minute killing spree (!) hundreds of casualties are made. The guys get into a get-away van, you want to do the same thing. Then the cynical end: Makarov turns and shoots you as well, square in the head. Once the Russians will discover a dead CIA agent, it will most likely escalate into full-scale war, reasons the coldblooded terrorist. Your vision is blurred by blood, as the terrorists escape. Game Over. You're dead.

This game for XBox 360 can purchased by anyone, anywhere. It is sold for instance by Wehkamp.nl, one of the largest postorder companies in the Netherlands, its clientele usually known for its love of floral prints. Of course also Amazon stocks this succesfull game in large numbers, explaining how to raise your score: "This can be done by leveling up, but another important way is through "kill streaks," the number of enemies eliminated in succession. These are available beginning with three kills and include the ability to call for supply drops, predator missile strikes, helicopter gunships and many more..... The game also features help to players experiencing "death streaks," multiple consecutive deaths in multiplayer matches" (http://www.amazon.com/Call-Duty-Modern-Warfare-Xbox-360/dp/B00269QLI8). Not surprising perhaps, that Amazon fails to mention that "players will be called upon to kill hundreds of innocent civilians in bloody massacres".

'Modern Warfare' may not be connected to yesterday's killings at all, but plenty of massacres have been linked to violent computer games, so let's not be surprised if this killer turns out to have been a gamer as well. The ultra-realistic 3D quality of shooting games blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual, where shooting up a real shopping mall is only a button click away for the mentally disturbed.

Cyberbullying (2)

Berlin schools wake up to the phenomenon of bullying via the Internet - cyberbullying, or as it is called in German: "Cybermobbing". The media became alerted because of a case of severe agression, spilling over from the web to the street, when one 17-year old boy couldn't stand the vicious virtual attacks on his girlfriend anymore. He had read these vitriolic comments on http://www.isharegossip.com/, a sick but successful commercial venture, inviting schoolkids to share their nastiest gossip on their website and advertising that this is 100% anonymous. The web in general, and websites such as these in particular, have taken the filthy gossip on the school bathroom door to a different level. Where the author of the note on the bathroom door ran the risk of being caught, this website allows children to spit out their venom for all to see, from the seclusion of their bedroom. In that same secluded bedroom, the cyberbullying victims read what others have shared about them. Some kids let it all out. Comments such as "sie ist die grösste schlampe, jeder junge kennt diese hure" ("she is the biggest tramp, every guy knowns this whore") and "wir sollten die drecks türken endlich abschieben" ("it is time we deport these filthy Turks") are harsh and shocking to anyone with a sane mind, but must be extremely hurting when aimed at specific classmates, whose names are mentioned in such messages. Even though these messages contain slander, racism and even incite violence, this gossip site can't be banned. The company who owns isharegossip.com was founded in New Sealand, and the site's actual host is based in Sweden, protected by the Pirate Party. This party is, among other things, looking to strengthen privacy rights on the Internet. The case of isharegossip.co, shows that the Web, next to being an endless source of information, has the potential to be dangerous and damaging. Strengthening privacy rights might be positive in the case of Wikileaks, but can be counterproductive when it serves to protect pedofiles and immoral sales people.

Improved legislation is one thing to fight this, training teachers and students, and making them aware of the dangers and effects of cyberbullying is another. Schools need to open up, and not act as if the Internet and their students' behaviour on the digital highway is none of their business. Teachers and school management need to enter the dialogue, both in the classroom, during assemblies, in smaller groups, as well as online, hosting online chats about the problems children are having with gossip sites or other kinds of cuberbullying. Why should schools not use Facebook for this kind of dialogue, thereby creating a closed and safe discussion platform that is familiar territory for the kids. Also 'spamming' such gossip websites with chunks of unrelated information, and overcrowding them with sensible comments may take away the fun of posting more gossip, as well as remind the kids that adults read these sites as well. I came across an entire Wikipedia entry on Karl Marx in between the other comments. Interesting choice of reading material - although intended to bore visitors off the site, no doubt. The latest battle against www.isharegossip.com seems to be successfull: Upon opening the website tonight, I saw this message:

"Mobbt das Mobbing! "Achtung! iShareGossip bringt die Posts auf die Seite Hauptmeldung, die am meisten bei "Gefällt ... " angeklickt und kommentiert wurden. Also: Mobbing-Posts NICHT anklicken, nicht kommentieren, sondern ignorieren. Anti-Mobbing-Post sooft wie möglich bei "Gefällt ..." (egal ob ... mir oder mir nicht) anklicken und kommentieren".

Basically it is using the website's own design against itself: the most often 'liked' comments get moved to the homepage, so the more people click that they 'like' an anti-bullying message, the higher the chance that it gets moved to the opening page. 414 people 'liked' the above message, so that this now welcomes the visitors to this site. I like it!

Free Resources for Teachers

The web is full of them, but thanks to the Guardian (still my favourite newspaper, 10 years after leaving the UK) many useful, practical, fun, interesting and interactive teaching resources have now been collected. The Guardian is opening up its resources website http://teachers.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network, to give teachers free access to 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive teaching materials. Dig in! :-)

Social Media and Generation Y: report

Social Media and Generation Y: report

Second School Forum

Last December, at Online Educa Berlin 2010, nearly two hundred teachers and head teachers defied the cold and snow on December 1st to gather at the second School Forum and hear about rich learning environments.

The forum opened with a presentation by Duane Sider, Learning Director of Rosetta Stone, on ‘Digital Natives: How they Learn and How we Teach’. Russell Stannard, principal lecturer at Warwick University in England and instigator of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, found that teachers are often willing to use new technologies but do not know where to start. Young learners are generally more comfortable with web tools and other technologies than most experienced teachers. Highly anticipated was the presentation of Sugata Mitra, the Indian professor of ‘Hole in the Wall’ fame. The inspirational professor spoke about just how well children can learn independently, when in groups and when motivated. Sugata’s most recent project involves experiments with what he calls the Granny Cloud: two hundred British grandmothers who have, for the last two years, offered children instructional support over the Skype communication system. According to the professor, a ‘motivational granny’ is all children need to learn effectively within a Self Organised Learning
Environment (SOLE).

Besides the presentations, a wide range of interactive demonstrations revealed useful and exciting tools, projects and resources for teaching. A small group of primary school children effortlessly used an interactive whiteboard to demonstrate their e-twinning platform. Other demonstrations showed virtual experiments and online games, learning management systems, personal learning networks, interactive language software and educational platforms. The teachers programmed robots and tried out different learning tools, both open source and proprietary. The forum concluded with a lively discussion between the presenters and the audience, showing once more the need for rich learning environments in which teachers motivate and facilitate, and learners collaborate and share.

Visual learning

This morning I read in a Digital Newsletter for German educators ('Der Lehrerfreund') that they now have a section on hands-on examples of technical processes in our everyday environment. Such as 'how does frost create cracks in the asphalt', or 'what happens exactly when you burn sugar'? Great! I thought. German education is discovering the advantages of visual learning, and how digital technology can be used to bring the outside world into the classroom. Filled with anticipation I opened the links, only to find the piece on frost and cracks involving a lot of text and a few graphics which repeated what was said in the written text. If you'd print it, you would have a regular book, as German students have known it since Gutenberg printed his bible. Although it might have been hard to video capture the process of cracks occurring in asphalt because of frost, it should be a piece of cake to do this for the process of burning sugar. My hopes up again, I opened that link, expecting to find some YouTube link showing me tantalising close ups of melting, bubbling and caramelising sugar on a flame. But alas, the Lehrerfreund Techie limits himself to a mere picture:
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I'm not saying that a graphic is not informative; but why use the Internet and digital technology to explain something you can also find in a regular science book?

Digital technology offers an extended educational value ; it makes learning visual and interactive. There is a sweet video for instance, about a kid who is burning sugar, filmed by his friend. The visual quality of 'the sugar mellting experiment' is not great and while you watch, you keep hoping the kids will not burn down the house in their enthusiasm as aspiring scientists, but the amateur experiment clearly shows you what happens to the sugar. The kids also comment on the smell and mention how it burns ("See, now it starts to burn, and that's black"). We see the sugar melting and caramelising, turning black, but no flame appears. Luckily, the kids turn off the stove afterwards.

This amateur video might actually be a classical learning moment for primary school kids; ask your students to come up with a definition of burning. If you define burning as something catching fire, it seems that sugar needs more than just heat; a catalyst needs to be added to the sugar, as our technical Lehrerfreund has tried to explain to us. What would that look like?

A ten-second search on YouTube yields the following video:

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It is a German video, from www.netexperimente.de As with any proper German product it is solid, devoid of any sense of humour, and to the point. It starts off with a professional version of what the kids in the kitchen did. There is a bunsen burner, a beautiful cone of sugar (how did they do that?!) and a steady camera. You can imagine the scientist behind the camera, wearing safety goggles and holding his or her breath, as not to disturb the experiment in any way. At first the sugar doesn't catch flame, although it bubbles and turns black; same result as the kids in the kitchen. The follow-up experiment shows the sugar cone covered in ash, which after prolonged burning does catch fire. The video has been sped up for the sake of the impatient YouTube generation - in a matter of a few minutes the white sugarcone turns into a smouldering, flaming towering inferno. Well, not exactly an inferno perhaps; but it does catch fire at some point, because of the ash. Conclusion: sugar needs a catalyst (ash) to burn.

The comments on the video are interesting as well; some students talk of the experiments they did, others comment on it. One doesn't understand the purpose of it, the other one wonders why it didn't catch fire better; one student suggest that perhaps too much ash was used in the experiment. Smart kid. By the way, this was the only German comment; perhaps the smart kid found the solution in his science book...

Cyberbullying

I am 12 and on Facebook. I am not supposed to be there, because I am under 13, the legally required FB age. But they make it so easy to lie, so I'm here, with my entire class and all the other parallel classes. I have not 'friended' any kids I don't like, only the ones that seem nice. And cool. It's very important to be cool on FB. It's like another hallway in school, where kids can bump in to you, and check you out. Only, it is much easier to check you out. And call you names. Someone tagged a pretty dumb picture of me the other day. So that picture showed up on my wall. Including the comments. 1. Hey dude, you look soooo lame! 2. Aren't you the most popular kid in school, wahaha!! 3. Dumb f*ck!! 4. Gawd you're ugly XD..... And so on. One comment followed another. I deleted the picture from my wall, but the writing continued, as I heard from kids in school. It seemed the most popular pastime. And I can't do anything about it....

An excerpt from an online diary. The case seems innocent enough; some remarks on a picture. But the willfull and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices is nothing less than cyberbullying. Why do kids do it? Because they can. Bullies, both in the classroom and in cyberspace, need attention themselves and have only learned to get it the nasty way. If parents are not aware of their children, then the teachers have to be all the more so. A teachers's job in the 21st century has to include digital awareness, in all its aspects. Knowing what social networks are, and how kids communicate. As much as the classroom has been extended into hyperspace, so has the school hallway. And both parents and teachers need to keep their eyes wide open. Discuss cyberbullying in the classroom. Ask the students to write an essay about the topic, and see what happens. If there are problems, try to tackle them through role-play and discussion groups with mediators.

The above diary excerpt is fictious, but could be written by kids any time. The Cyberbullying Research Center informs students that cyberbullying is when someone “repeatedly makes fun of another person online or repeatedly picks on another person through email or text message or when someone posts something online about another person that they don’t like.” Using this definition, about 20% of the over 4,400 randomly‐selected 11‐18 year‐old students in 2010 indicated they had been a victim at some point in their life.

eLearning Africa

Meeting the networking needs of the pan-African eLearning and distance education sector, the annual eLearning Africa conference is the key networking venue for practitioners and professionals from Africa and all over the world. Check out this year's agenda at www.elearning-africa.com/programme_table_2010.php and join the a wide range of experts in workshops, plenaries and parallel sessions in Lusaka, Zambia from May 26th to 28th.

Be Very Afraid

Today I spoke with Stephen Heppell, driving force behind the Be Very Afraid project (UK). He told me of classrooms which are completely open, have no unnatural 40 minute learning chunks but instead experiment with two subjects per day, an entire morning devoted to math, playing, writing, reading, singing, filming math for all I know; just think about how much learning can take place in such a half day. Stephen Heppel starts with the learners, he asks them where they prefer to read and whether they can take pictures of those spots, using their cellphones. And what does that show; yes of course; pictures of beds, beanbags, nice and cosy corners - a world apart from regular classrooms. Students who need to stay at home because of the extreme cold and basically set up a virtual school by themselves; using Google docs, a platform on Ning and shooting videos which they place on YouTube to exchange thoughts and ideas. He has taken his inpiration from the kids and brings it to the policymakers. Now there's a thought. What's more is that Stephen lives on a boat which is moored in st Katherine's Dock, London's charming inner city harbour. My parents stayed there for two weeks after I had given birth to my lovely first born - they had sailed the canal to visit their first grandchild, how cool is that :-) More about Be Very Afraid can be found on: http://www.heppell.net/bva/