Our First Conversation with New Friends in Turkey

Trepidation

I feel like a girl all dressed up waiting for my prom date. This morning, fifth graders at my school are convening in the tech lab before school (way before I am usually here) to have their first web chat with their partner school in Turkey. I'm nervous for them, and I'm nervous for us. I'm nervous that they'll say something to offend our new friends...we didn't talk as much as we should have about cultural bias. Good thing I'm drinking decaf this morning.

Image Credit: http://www.artbywicks.com/waiting%20in%20repose%20with%20texture.jpg

Downloading YouTube Videos

There have been a lot of videos on You Tube I wanted to download and then include in, say, a slideshow. If did not have Internet access for some of my presentations and wanted to share some of the clips, I'd be outta luck. As many of you may have experienced, downloading them isn't as easy as it should be. They save as FLV files and WHO HAS THAT READER anyway?

I read a great tip in the Oct 2007 Tech Learning magazine from an article entitled "You Can Take It With You." If you use a site called Zamzar, it will allow you to choose the file type for the movie, will encode it and then email you a download link all within a few minutes. I tried it for a grad school presentation this week and it worked well. Try it!

Effectiveness of Technology in Education

Great article from T.H.E. Journal about The Effectiveness of Technology in Education. Basically, she says it's an irrelevent question. Check it out:
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21544_5

More on Identity

Sherry Turkle (MIT) wrote an article entitled "How Computers Change the Way We Think" in the Jan 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education. I thought this snippet was particularly interesting and conflicts with the somewhat relieving information I posted about last....

"Avatars or a self? Chat rooms, role-playing games, and other technological venues offer us many different contexts for presenting ourselves online. Those possibilities are particularly important for adolescents because they offer what Erik Erikson described as a moratorium, a time out or safe space for the personal experimentation that is so crucial for adolescent development. Our dangerous world -- with crime, terrorism, drugs, and AIDS -- offers little in the way of safe spaces. Online worlds can provide valuable spaces for identity play.
But some people who gain fluency in expressing multiple aspects of self may find it harder to develop authentic selves. Some children who write narratives for their screen avatars may grow up with too little experience of how to share their real feelings with other people. For those who are lonely yet afraid of intimacy, information technology has made it possible to have the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship."

Hmm....the research continues.
Image Credit: http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/

Forming Identity

If you've read any of my previous blogposts or forum posts lately, you know that I've been on a mad mission to explore whether there are negative effects for children who are developing their sense of identity at the same time as manufacturing multiple identities online. Today, I found the definitive source...written four years ago, would you believe? In a book of journal articles titled Children in the Digital Age edited by Calvert, Jordan and Cocking, I found an essay by Sandra L. Calvert. In the essay, she explores "Identity Construction on the Internet." I'm excited because she basically asks the exact same questions I have been asking myself and provides some interesting insights. Just as with most things in life, the answer is not simple. It all depends on what developmental psychologist you follow!

1. Erikson would likely say that as children are forming their "single unitary identity," they are merely using the Internet as a place in which to experiment, to try on various identities before settling on one.

2. Jung believed in a single identity (personae) as well, but he integrated these "archetypal images" into his theory--the mother, child, healer, king, witch, healer, etc. The Internet, again, provides a sort of playground on which children can take on the mantle of various archetypes before integrating one or many of them.

3. Social (Symbolic) Interactionists like Mead would say that none of us have a single identity, but that we shuffle various identities as we shift into different environments and social situations. Thus, the Internet is simply an extension of that exploration and construction of those parts of self.

Hallelujah! So the answer seems fairly clear, that the nefarious nature I thought might be intrinsic is not actually there. EXCEPT (and there's always an except isn't there?) that they are exploring and trying on all these identities in a public sphere, one that is timeless and placeless. In 5 or 10 years, a copy of that Web page will still be around on "The Way Back Machine". It's like a high school yearbook with all our worst school photos (identities) ONLINE for all to see for the rest of time.

Added to that embarrassment is the potential danger involved in exploring archetypes or identities that may bring personal safety into question. The real issue is how MUCH information children are putting out there about themselves, not what kind, it seems. Finally, there is the possibility that a child may be confronted with images and behavior he or she is not developmentally ready to process. But, I guess that's a different topic altogether.

World Village Project Update

It's working! It's working! I'm just superstitious enough to worry that I anger the technology gods with that proclamation, but by golly it is working. Our second graders are having consistent communication with their partner class in Thailand. Our fifth graders are "meeting" their partner class in Turkey next week via videoconference. There are TWO, count 'em, TWO partnerships occurring simultaneously in our Spanish classes between Spain (Barcelona) and Argentina. And there has been a spontaneous pairing between our French classes and a tiny school in the countryside of France. The only one that has fallen through is our Holland connection. That irritates me, but I'd say the percentages are pretty good.

Some hints: Our French teacher made her connection all on her own through Epals. She assures me that she got a response in only one day, and a mail exchange in only a week. The Thailand connection came through a colleague I met (Kim Cofino) on the Global Ed Ning. I've made the Argentina connection through Global Schoolhouse and the Turkey connection via the Sister Schools Project on the Global Awareness for Teachers Web site.

Creating Life

So many of the writing assignments that are assigned and completed at most schools are a one-way, or maximum two-way communication between the student and the teacher. The communication ends there, and it often ends in a crumpled ball tucked in between the sides of a locker and a math textbook. I've felt driven lately to give those assignments new life. I caught about 10 minutes of a lecture given by Tim Fish at the AIMS Conference on students in the Web 2.0 world. Most of it wasn't new information, but he showed this really neat personal narrative that had been brought to life through image, song and spoken word. "Wait just a second!" I thought. "Our fifth graders write personal narratives, too." Needless to say, the idea has germinated in my classroom. Fifth graders are just now drawing, downloading and capturing photographic images that somehow tell their story. We're using Voicethread to create these stories, and they'll narrate them last. I have to say, they are ALL ABOUT this activity. The public nature of voicethread appeals to their massive adolescent, post Myspace Reality TV egos. There are more ways to extend and expand written communication, whose day as a standalone activity are nearing extinction.

Everything is Connected

Not for the first time in my real life, but for the first time in my online life today I felt censored. Twice. First, I had to take down something I wrote here. I had to take it down for a good reason, a solid reason, but I still didn't like it. I've never known the feeling of not being able to express myself online before...it has always been this wide open space, this sky.

And then yesterday, a friend asked me to write something in support of her cause. I used to believe in her cause, but since then, I have distanced myself from it. I think of it as something I used to know or think in a different life. But now, that request she has made draws me backward and I am no longer as free as I once was to express myself...I have an online presence, I teach, parents and friends may disagree with my old choices. Although it may seem like these are random thoughts, they are all connected. We are all connected. And for the same reason I had to take something off my blog, and the same reason why I cannot write something for my friend's cause--my old cause--that might later be linked back to me online, I am intensely aware of how tightly, inextricably we are all connected. It's a spiritual lesson in the Buddhist sense. It's almost as good as being in church on Sunday, my Southern Baptist preaching grandpa hitting the message home from his high lecturn over the crowd. We are all connected. It's all connected. The limitations I face today are indication of my place in this world. Of everyone's place in this world.
Image credit: http://www.moondance.org/2005/summer05/poetry/graph-of-tree-and-roots.jpg

Digital Immigrants Making Friends

The entire process of making friends online is certainly different than than the one we used in gradeschool. Today, I met Alex Ragone in person. He's someone I have chatted with on email, in some forums, and I invited him to speak at the AIMS Conference today. I'm on the Academic Advisory committee for AIMS and my job is to select the technology sessions for the conference. I was impressed with what Alex was doing with Skype and asked him to present. He talked a little bit about how building relationships online is necessarily incremental.

I mean, you usually start interacting in text and then move on to audio and maybe photos, but video is last. That enthralls me. Think about it. Text is impersonal and private. Reading is a private activity. Seeing a photo of someone allows you to connect to that person on a visual level and that makes the relationship more intimate (keep your heads out of the gutters, please). Hearing that person's voice starts to shift the relationship even further and then once you see that person in video, you no longer have as many illusions about the person. Your imagination (your private sphere) no longer plays a role in developing that person's personality--it's just reality. Thinking about that process today made me see how the very PUBLIC NATURE of communication, of our entire culture these days is directly related to how we developed relationships in the "Gutenberg Galaxy." I wonder if these rules about how a relationship develops apply to the digital natives? I'm thinking not, but maybe....