The Five Gifts of Sharing

Everything You Need To Know About the Future of Education You Learned in Preschool

Sharing. In preschool, our teachers wouldn’t shut up about it. The rest of our school careers, it’s like they never learned it themselves. Think about it. In grade school, high school, even in college, what happened to all that great content you produced? That “Where the Wild Things Are” diorama? That coming-of-age introduction to film screenplay? That term paper on electoral reform? Very likely, three things:

1. Your teacher reviewed it, thoroughly if he or she possessed the motivation or time, less than thoroughly if he or she didn’t.

2. Your teacher assigned a grade to it, and, sometimes but not always, provided written or verbal comments.

3. You paid more attention to the grade than the comments and filed the assignment away to gather actual or virtual dust — or simply trashed it.

With the Web all but eliminating the production and distribution costs of content sharing, education is becoming more participatory, but not to the extent it could be or should be, according to members of the “The Future of Learning is the Web” panel at last week’s FutureWeb conference in Raleigh, N.C. Even many e-learning programs, they said, are little more than traditional lessons dressed up in online clothes. The trick, panelist Tony O’Driscoll, professor of the practice of business administration at Duke University, said, is to go from using technology as an engine for automating the classroom to using technology as a network for liberating learning.

The trick is to go from using technology as an engine for automating the classroom to using technology as a network for liberating learning.

— Tony O’Driscoll, professor of the practice of business administration, Duke University

O’Driscoll and his four panelmates, also Duke University professors, argued that sharing the educational process on blogs, social media, discussion forums, crowdsourcing sites and elsewhere online benefits students, teachers and society alike.

• Sharing’s first gift is motivation. When students know their work is potentially being judged by their peers, experts or even just anonymous Internet users, they take their work up a notch. The extra eyes likewise motivate teachers to maximize the quality and relevancy of their assignments.

• Sharing’s second gift is feedback. Constructive criticism affords students a chance to improve their work before turning it in. Praise in the form of a comment, repost or adaptation validates their scholarship in a way an arbitrary letter grade never could. Meanwhile, if students aren’t reacting the way teachers expected, teachers can see this and call an audible.

• Sharing’s third gift is understanding. The public and even other educators often dismiss divergent teaching approaches as lacking earnestness or structure. Why tell critics your allegedly easy class is actually challenging when you can show them by posting the final exam question online, as panelist Mark Anthony Neal, black popular culture professor, recently did?

• Sharing’s fourth gift is what O’Driscoll called “double-loop learning.” External audiences absorb students’ knowledge and respond in kind with their own, which students fold back into their work. This cycle additionally addresses what panelists criticized as academia’s lack of urgency.

• Sharing’s fifth gift is efficiency. Rather than over-extending themselves trying to become an instant expert in something they’re not, teachers can outsource the job to the real experts. The organizing power of online networks further frees up teachers to teach — and, critically, the panelists said, to provide context for the deluge of information modern students must manage. This benefit applies to organizing people — think about those hundred-plus-student freshman classes at public universities — as well as information.

Given that education has long been a pet interest of mine, that many from my family work in or have worked in education and that I used to cover education as a newspaper reporter, I found this panel especially engaging. There’s a fourth reason, however, that it spoke to me so. And that is how closely the changes taking place in education resemble the changes taking place in my own industry: news. In both education and journalism, the process is becoming a product. In each industry, successful practitioners will leverage this new process-product to improve the traditional product.

Neal, author of the NewBlackMan website, and O’Driscoll, co-author of “Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration,” spoke alongside Duke colleagues professor of interdisciplinary studies Cathy Davidson, the panel chairwoman and writer of the widely circulated blog post “How to Crowdsource Grading;” professor of history and romance studies Laurent DuBois, a French colonialism expert who also blogs about the politics of soccer; and associate professor Negar Mottahedeh, best known for organizing the Axis of Evil and Twitter film festivals and for her commentary on last summer’s Iranian election protests. Video from the panel is available on the conference’s YouTube channel.

BONUS: Noteworthy links mentioned by the panelists:

• The Haiti Lab project DuBois is helping to run
• HASTAC’s Digital Media and Learning Competition
• Henry Jenkins’ Social Media Classroom
• Classroom collaboration tool Hotseat

Learning For A Lifetime

Less than seven months from now, if all goes as planned, I’ll receive my second degree from Elon University, this time a Master of Arts in Interactive Media. I expect this to mark the end of my formal education. Of course, that’s what I was leaning toward after undergrad. And here I am, back in school. In any case, in this fast-moving field I’ve chosen, what is certain is that my informal education will never be complete. 

My program, just 10 months long, is designed for this pace. The idea is to keep students from getting too detached from the professional world and to get them back in the field while their skills are still fresh. 

Still, a lot can happen in 10 months. Twitter, for example, has exploded in popularity since January, gaining tens of millions of users. 

To keep up, I’ll continue to read as much media and technology news as I can find time for, seek out opportunities to learn from talented colleagues and probably drop in on the occasional weekend workshop. 

Where these means fall short or are impractical, online training is an attractive option. Structured, up-to-date instruction from experts the globe over when and where I want? I’ll take it. Sure, it’s not as personal as classroom learning, but next-generation video conferencing and virtual reality could help it come close. 

Certification is another benefit of many online training programs, offering professionals a level of authority that saying they know a new skill or even talking about it intelligently just doesn’t. 

One such example is Google’s Conversion University. Since March, the search engine giant has administered an analytics certification program based on its approximately 230-minute online course. Applicants pay $50 to take an online test, and, if they score 75 percent or higher, are registered as Google Analytics qualified. 

I was assigned today to complete the course for one of my classes. Since I’ll be putting in the study time, I figure I might as well aim for the certification. If I get it, thanks to a just-introduced feature, I’ll be able to prove it with an official link. I’ll update my progress and share what I learn in this space. Stay tuned. Or, perhaps I should say, “be a returning visitor.”

They’ll Assume You’re a Social Media Expert. Prove Them Right.

In no other marketing arena are messages born, spread and adapted as quickly as they are in social media. Reputations can be bolstered or broken in a few clicks.

To whom do firms turn to navigate this volatile landscape? Very often, young people.

In Elon University’s School of Communications, nearly every summer internship student this year reported completing social media-related tasks such as creating Facebook and Twitter accounts or blogging.

Young people, it’s assumed, know social media. That they at least have a better grasp of it than their older colleagues is generally a safe bet. The median age of a Facebook user is 26, a MySpace user 27 and a Twitter user 31, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But what exactly do young people know? Do they know how to monitor what customers are saying and exploit opportunities and put out fires? Or do they just know how to post mundane status updates and write clever captions?

The Elon interns, who had already been blogging and studying reputation management in their classes, were better positioned than most. The communication school’s internship director wrote to faculty and staff that in many cases supervisors were impressed enough by students’ skill level to extend to them opportunities not offered to other interns.

But what about those without any formal training? Young people who on their face seem social media savvy may in fact be practicing some very bad habits. Friending everyone and their brother regardless of their character merely to increase their own perceived popularity. Posting embarrassing photos of themselves and their friends without regard for what potential employers may think. Not the kind of quality control you want in the business world.

Furthermore, behind the technology bells and whistles, strong social media marketing comes down to strong writing. And, while the opposite argument is also made, there is concern among educators that electronic communication’s carefree spelling, lax punctuation and grammar and acronym shortcuts degrade writing quality, also according to Pew.

Students or young workers may read this and get defensive. “We can write.” “We can and do use social media responsibly.” And I hope they do call me out. Because, what an opportunity. If you know social media tasks are probably going to be part of your next job — or are part of your job now, why not do a little homework and learn how to use social media to grow a brand, not just grow your friend count? You’ll differentiate yourself from your peers and just might get that promotion a bit sooner.

Social media blog Mashable’s How To section is a good starting point. It’s a gold mine of concise primers, some geared toward general social media literacy, but many also geared toward business applications.

The Art of Failure

There’s a grade school art piece of mine, a watercolor, I like to reference to illustrate — pardon the pun — why one should never be afraid of mistakes.

The assignment involved using a cardboard edge to paint the wisps of a flower’s stem. Class was winding down and my piece looked nothing like a flower. The more I tried to fix it, though, the less like a flower it looked. Panicked, I frantically swiped the cardboard across the paper. I was close to giving up when I realized what I was painting did look like something: grass.

With a new design in mind, I worked with greater care and confidence. What I thought was a lost cause suddenly resembled a scene one might find in nature.

It also had pretty brilliant depth of field. It ended up being featured in the student art show at the town center mall for thousands of shoppers to see.

My parents still have the piece. I’ll try to digitize it and post it here sometime.

Two Golden Rules for Interviewers

My cohorts and I are in the thick of the expert-interview stage of our future-oriented research projects and today our professor, a former newspaper journalist, gave a slide presentation of interviewing tips. An ex-print journalist myself, I received similar advice in high school, at internships, in college and in the workplace.

Still, a refresher never hurts. Familiarity breeds complacency. On deadline, one adopts shortcuts, and some of them stick.

Research ahead of time. Have a backup plan for if technology fails. Save hardball questions for the end. Always get contact information for follow-ups. All tried and true.

Two of my favorite tips are also among the simplest:

First, leverage the power of silence. Yeah, it’s uncomfortable for the interviewer, but, trust me, it’s even more uncomfortable for the subject. I used this technique at my last reporting job to get details on the relationship between a murder victim and the suspect before police were ready to announce them.

I was canvassing the apartment complex where the homicide occurred and came across a chatty older gentleman who seemed to know more than he was letting on. Sensing he was one of those people who enjoy the sound of their own voice, I kept him talking no matter the subject. Then, I asked what I came there to ask and waited. And waited. Sure enough, he spilled what he wasn’t ready to spill before. His information matched up perfectly with what the police would later release.

This technique is helpful not only for sensitive questions but also for complex ones. If a subject doesn’t answer immediately, it’s natural for the interviewer to assume something was wrong with the question and scale it back. Give the subject time to think things through. The point of an interview is to generate original, well-thought-out answers, not trite, off-the-cuff ones.

Second, before ending an interview, always ask something to the effect of, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?” Usually, the source’s response will yield something of value. It’s not always groundbreaking, but, surprisingly often, it is. The source will point out an essential resource or raise an issue that completely reshapes the story.

A ridiculously open-ended question can even produce a bombshell. It did for me one Sunday afternoon working the cops shift at my first paper. The police beat required tracking disorder of all forms across a sprawling four-county area. Keeping an ear to the scanner and asking “Anything going on?” “Anything else?” over and over was pretty much the only way to do this. I made the first of two routine calls to one of several state police barracks on my call sheet and asked the routine question. “Any accidents, arrests, anything to report?

“Oh, you’re calling about the arrest from last night,” said the trooper on the other end of the line. “What do you want to know?”

I had no idea what arrest he was referring to but it was obvious it was newsworthy. “Umm,” I thought, before responding with more boilerplate, “Name, age, residence, location of the incident, the charge.”

Whether the trooper could tell that I was clueless I’ll never know. But the name was that of the county sheriff. The charge? Drunken driving.

Yes, preparation and tact are important, but the worst question can be the one never asked.

Kids These Days: A Window to Tomorrow

Forecasting the future conjures up images of peering into a crystal ball. Or, perhaps, Conan O’Brien’s “In the Year 3000″ sketches. And sometimes carefully considered research isn’t any more reliable. Indeed, from time to time, the innovators themselves get it comically wrong. Western Union’s president said the “telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” Thomas Edison said “the phonograph has no commercial value at all.”

As bright minds squint to try to bring the future into focus, they often overlook that the future, in a way, is just down the street. The attitudes that will shape that mysterious future are on display every day at the neighborhood elementary school.

A classmate of mine recently joked that today’s children are born knowing how to use a computer. They nearly are. Early this decade, more than two-thirds of preschoolers were using computers, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report. The proportion is likely even greater now.

A fifth-grader I mentored last school year already had his own e-mail address and YouTube account. So did many of his classmates. Technologically, his generation is light years ahead of where mine was at that age. And that’s what tends to get the attention. “Kids and their gadgets these days,” one adult might remark to another. 

Less appreciated, however, is the communication literacy this engenders. From the earliest age, children are consumers — and, increasingly, creators — of media. They do not know the definition of online communities theory or uses and gratifications theory, but they are applying each. By the time they reach high school, they have a more sophisticated relationship with media than adults probably give them credit for.

A few of my peers, one of whom is studying the use of interactive gaming as a learning tool, will meet some of these young minds over the course of their research. Anyone interested in the future, however, owes it to himself to visit a classroom. Today’s students can be great teachers.