DRAFT--IN PROGRESS!

Got an idea of where to publish this or what I should/n't say here? Feel free to let me know! ssanderson@bemidjistate.edu

Why We Must "Wiki" in Social Studies

by Siri Anderson, Ed.D.

The elephant muddying the water: NCLB

We know that schools, in the spirit of meeting the objectives of NCLB, are reducing the teaching time allocated for Social Studies around the nation.  We also know that research shows this may be counter productive in terms of facilitating student's reading skills: After a third grade reading level is achieved improvements in reading scores are significantly correlated with vocabulary knowledge. If students do not have rich content area knowledge in Science, Social Studies, the Arts, and Physical Education their vocabulary growth (and test scores) are likely to be negatively effected.

Bu teachers risk further handicapping students with low reading scores by decreasing their time in these important content areas (ostensibly in order to spend time on "reading instruction"). Instead, we might take seriously the charge to expand both students' content knowledge and reading skills through appropriate consistent, systematic incorporation of content area literacy strategies and vocabulary building.

Bridging Worlds

In the spirit of modeling best practice in Social Studies education, DLIiTE students in an Elementary Social Studies Methods class are completing work that is both relevant, real world, 21st Century, and contributes actively to making this a better place by sharing their hard work with the world! (Just as they will strive, as teachers, to bring their students' work to a wider audience and broader purpose.)

To share our learning--while also building the capacity of others to better meet the needs of their learners--we are developing lesson plan ideas, linked to essential questions, following principles of Understanding by Design and building on the best free resources available to all through the Internet. To improve likelihood of use, we are striving to ensure that these lesson plans will facilitate student engagement in the discipline of Social Studies, but also actively encourage the literacy growth of learners through expanding their background knowledge and vocabulary.

In the spirit of best practice, our assignment is differentiated in terms of:

• content (everyone gets to choose the book/topic/theme that is most compelling from their perspective)

• process (everyone can choose different ways to design  their lesson materials)

• and outcome (everyone can decide how much they want to put into this)

However, everyone MUST wiki. Why wiki?

The Opportunity

The opportunity to produce materials for a world stage alters the traditional teacher-student dynamic in fundamental ways. My dissertation on Critical Media Literacy emphasized the dynamic of passivity that was initiated by the media and confounded by classroom practices. Somehow, only six years later, that work seems absurdly close to being out of date and irrelevant: media today that matter most to us as educators are all about interaction, not inaction.

Previously, the teacher was either (banking model) the "purveyor" or (coaching model) the "guide" of knowledge/skills. The students' capacity to actualize that knowledge or skill was assessed in a private communication between teacher and student.

We might now consider acknowledging a new paradigm. The actual purveyor of knowledge and skills is predominantly society -- "the media," corporations, social networks and institutional affiliations -- and that students have come to "live outloud" or "live in public." The relationship between the teacher and her students has, like the world, exploded in terms of types of interactions and means of feedback possible. It used to be that a student really only had the opportunity to take a print media text, read it, analyze/synthesize/evaluate, and offer written or spoken feedback for the teacher (or, on special occasions, the class) to evaluate. But now the student can read, watch, listen to, or interact with information which might be represented in words, visuals, sounds. Likewise, the student can both respond in all those different ways (words, images, and sounds) in varying combinations and formats and get feedback from anyone with access to the World Wide Web.  Learning opportunities today are undeniably more dynamic than they were even ten years ago.

When we talked about creating "relevant" classroom learning connections in the '80s and '90s we still were generally imagining our students being able to extrapolate the potential use-value of our work together. We held mock-trials, simulated elections, and created bills for our imaginary congress to consider. But this disconnect between what we do everyday in our classroom and what happens everyday in the real world is no longer necessary or fruitful or tenable. Because, like it or not, the students are out there, operating in the world as creators and commentators and consumers. If we don't move our Social Studies classroom practice out there with them, we aren't doing justice to the fundamental charge we have as Social Studies educators: To develop the capacity of our learners as active, informed and engaged citizens.

Web 2.0 is a communications revolution not unlike the invention of the printing press in the 1500s. Dramatic, profound, painful shifts are in the works now -- just as they were then. 

Communication is now a two way portal that reaches around the world and transforms a very basic tenet of the student-teacher paradigm: That students perform for the teacher who evaluates and gives feedback to the student.

1. Students are now able to perform, for free, on a global stage.

2. Students are now able to collaborate, for free, with a global community -- or just with their friends (who are sitting only two rows away from them--or in the classroom next door, or next hour, or down the street...)

3. Students are pumped up about authoring  and creating for this new stage:

• They want to write (albeit in txt)

• They want to design (web pages, Flickr, Bubbleshare, Slideshare, Sumo art)

• They want to publish (to My Space, blogger, Dippity, pbwiki, VoiceThread, GCast)

• They want to produce (iMovie, WMV, animation)

Clearly to make this a reality we all need to understand principles of web design and presentation. This,in turn, will have to mean that some curricular emphasis back onto the arts (away from standardized testing) has got to happen in schools K-12. In this new era of digital social communication, how can we call ourselves "literate" without an understanding of visual and digital literacy from here on out?

The Challenges: Time, Capacity, Purpose, Stimulation

Time

The challenges, actually, are many. But there are a few that I've noticed surfacing on a repeated basis that merit public conversation.  To begin with, almost 100% of teachers (over a certain age) at all levels of education respond in exactly the same way when I talk about the exciting new world that is Web 2.0: They all say one word, "Time." The connecting stem they use may differ. "If only..." "When there is...." "How do you find..." "I'd like to but..."

This appears to be coming from an inappropriate decision-making criteria from the perspective of those already swimming in the Web 2.0 "water."

To carry this metaphor out, from the "water" those on the "side" of the river appear to be very busy--and are even working hard on "this," "that," and "the other things." The land dwellers may gaze at the river as it is cascading by them, and fantasize, briefly, about what they will do "once they have time" to get in the water.

What they don't appear to recognize is that: When you get in the water you immediately and dramatically move away from where you were. The current is swift. The "this," "that," and "the other" that seemed so important while on the side of the river are gone from view. (This is, in fact, an issue and not always a good one.)

But the students are going downstream, without most of the teaching faculty with whom they currently interact. If we want to teach them we have to get in too.

Capacity

There are new things to which one must attend in the river. New tools are available. New boundaries for public and private are certain. New resources are constantly bumping into you and taking you onto a different tributary. The overall strategies for success are generally the same: learn, analyze, reflect, change, do. But the ride takes on a momentum of its own once you get in and start swimming. And there are legitimate questions being asked by those on the shore about the individual's capacity to handle the new ways that online learning environments act on a person's brain, calendar, focus.

Students have already been swimming. This makes them great at dealing with many of the new "this" and "that" and "the other" that one finds in the river. But they are not very good at the strategies one needed for success on the land. Strategies that allow one to do the work that needs to be done and flourish.

My favorite analogy for this is the hunt. We are programmed to have this drive to survive that instills a formula of cost-benefit into us of what we are/are not willing to do. We need to eat so we may choose to plan for a hunt. It goes like this: 

• We plan our departure and place for the hunt.
• We organize our materials and prepare them.
• We practice our skills such as aiming and shooting until we feel we may have success.
• We arrive at our destination and withstand weather and muscle fatigue awaiting our prey.
• We take careful aim and fell our prey.
• We experience a rush of emotion and excitement.
• We go to the felled animal and see it's sad but beautiful countenance.
• We gut it.
• We drag its heavy carcass across terrain filled with obstacles until we reach our destination.
• We hang the carcass.
• We further dress the meet and deal with the entrails.
• We take off our soiled sweaty clothes and prepare them for our next expedition.
• We prepare the meat.
• We build the fire and cook the meat.
• We eat the delicious flesh of the animal and experience a satisfying and nourishing meal.
• We clean up our kitchen and dishes.
• We tend to our other needs or the needs of others.
• We go to bed.
• If necessary, we repeat in the morning.

Children of the river, also known as "digital natives" experience this same type of event in a very different way throughout their formative years. It may be called "Crazy Taxi" or "Super Mario" or "Star Wars Legos" but it is the same idea.

• They plan their interest and stick the disc in the console.
• They play.
• They experience a rush of victory.
• They play.
• They experience a rush of victory.
• They play.
• The experience a rush of defeat.
• They play.
• They experience a rush of victory.
• The play.
• Someone comes and provides them with food and warmth and psychological nourishment.
• They experience a rush of victory.
• They may remember to turn it all off when they are forced, kicking and screaming, to go to bed.

The balance, as you see, is not the same. So whereas those of us on the side of the river have learned the importance of attending to "this," "that," and "the other" the children in the river have not. The way in which the river stimulates your pleasure seeking interests on a rapid and unending nature with only minimal physical, mental or ethical effort on your part leads you to believe that these "things" may not be all the necessary.

Consider the idea of "delayed gratification" that was the backbone of middle-class ethos for the last century or so. How does a kid who grew up in this electronic milieu relate to that concept? Everything is instantly gratified. Want a song? Go download it. Want to understand something? Go watch a video on it. Want to communicate something? Choose one of a dozen means to do so instantly around the world or to the person next to you all at the same fraction of a penny cost. (txt, facebook, email, call, skype, twitter, Sim, wiki, snap a photo or video and send through your phone etc.)

As instructors this might be leading students to want more and more interesting feedback from us. They are used to being "stoked" more often than a student of the 1940s was by his/her life. Our children are growing up in a hyper-stimulating environment that provides them countless hours of personalized attention. Consider, for instance, the manner of feedback you get when playing a Wii game. A person (avatar) pops on and applauds you, or gives you hints on your pitch or rhythm or balance or aim after every round. How often did an eight year old boy playing by himself expect to get personalized feedback while out fishing or building a fort or playing soccer with friends in the nearby vacant lot?

See Wall-E if you want a dystopic view of where this may take us.

This is, of course, exagerrated for effect. But it strikes me that what students may NOT want to do in the future is:

1. Think critically about significant amount of data that they have organized, processed and come to understand.

2. Do one thing (well) at a time.

3. The slow laborious work of accumulating data and making sense of multiple competing truths.

Certainly these things will not be compelling if the are presented in a boring, static, irrelevant manner. We can no longer afford the standards that have been laid out for our discipline, because most teachers cannot go backward and forward with their students simultaneously. Textbooks are almost completely irrelevant at this point. While the industry standard Social Studies textbook was always a sure recipe for a good nights sleep, in the current paradigm where students are used to being rewarded with a psychological thrill for the most limited effort on their own part, culling through the deadweight of one of those texts now for a few gleaming morsels of insight and meaning seems absurd. Why would you read page after page of text in which all drama and controversy has been removed when you can flip on your laptop and watch, listen to, read and publicly respond to the entire world and it's history zooming by you at a million miles an hour?

Purpose

Which raises the other big issue that I especially see older teachers struggling to figure out: What is their purpose? How can they operate in a world where the students are looking away from the teacher more often than they are looking toward the teacher for answers? The "guide on the side" concept has taken on a very new relevance. One of the frequent comments an experienced teacher will make after discussing the "time" issue is the idea that "I can't keep up."

This is also brought up as a way to brush aside an interest in using new technologies, as in: As soon as I learn that system a new system will begin and then all my hard work will have been wasted.

The first part is certainly true. Before you can master one program a new one has appeared. If you think you need to master a program before you can teach it, this makes it feel impossible to move forward for many. But we cannot fight the rising tide. All the evidence points to this trend only speeding up over the next ten years. 

The solution is to give up being the purveyor of knowledge, and switch to becoming an expert on process and a truth-sayer on purpose. We need to become like children ourselves and learn by doing. We understand many important aspects of the world by picking up a seed and planting it, or picking up a rock and smashing a decaying log open. We observe and learn by observing, doing, noting, cross-checking, experimenting, playing, sharing, comparing, exploring, wondering.

The "nature" of the Web 2.0 tools now available to our students are materials no different than trees in the forest. They start as seeds and become a decaying life form. We are not damaged by touching a tree in the forest if that tree disappears the next day. If we build a shelter from tree branches and later use those as firewood we still got value from them. There will be others. We will begin again tomorrow addressing the needs that we have with the tools that are available. Right now the tools are different than the ones that were here ten years ago. And these are different than those that will be available ten years from now. No harm done. Just stop trying to control the answers and submit to the fact that we have entered a new kind of forest in which play will be central to productivity.

(See The Networked Student http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwM4ieFOotA)

See The Children of Cyberspace http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/weekinreview/10stone.html

The students in Bemidji State University's DLiTE program are proud to share their work with you from ED 3240 Social Studies Methods -- and look forward to your feedback.