social

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Open Badges

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Open Badges

If you want to ride the wave of what’s new and hip, then an emerging concept called open badges is worth checking out. Open badges have actually been around for a while but have recently garnered much attention – especially with Mozilla’s recent release of their open badges site for coding and web development.

The concept is simple, just like boy scouts receive a badge for proficiency of a skill, open badges are proficiency badges that are given by an organisation (such as Mozilla) or by peers. It’s a system where proficiency in skills can be legitimised by receiving peer recognition.

The idea is novel and has enormous potential to disrupt traditional educational institutes. Currently, the only legitimate education is through universities. However what would happen if open badges were legitimsed? What if companies started recognising open badges as ways of evaluating potential employees?

The impact of open badges is yet to be determined. However there’s a clear trend online (in social communities) where certain members are recognised as having skills. In online groups, some participants rise to the top and are acknowledged for their abilities – whether that’s organising the group, contributing, teaching others or whatever.

If we build skills by participating in social online communities, do they translate into workplace skills? Will future resumes be filled with badges instead of academic degrees?

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Beyond New Literacies – D. Wilber

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Beyond New Literacies – D. Wilber

The world, according to Wilber, is constantly changing with the development of new technologies. As well, there’s a rise in new language and literary practices born of technological change. The concern is how to analyse such rapid development of technology within that literacies framework.

The field of new literacies is the focus on how technology and tools shape language and literacies in daily life. The emphasis of such study is on what makes literacies ‘new’ in an environment of constantly changing tech tools. Wilber considers how such tools exploit global networking together with cutting edge software and hardware.

Today, technological change happens so rapidly that the changes to literacy are limited not to technology, but rather by our ability to adapt and acquire the new literacies that emerge.

New literacies must be studied as soon as they emerge, while they’re being adopted and taking shape within people’s lifestyles. New literacies are able to traverse all social spaces from education, family, leisure, work, public and private life. 

New literacies can be defined as ‘tech stuff’ and their ‘ethos’ – referring to the spirit or the way in which the technology is used. New technologies lend themselves to an ethos which is participatory , via collaboration and open sharing of information online. Fluidity is also emerging as an ethos of new literacies as texts are remixed, reshaped, mashed up and added to. One good term (not mentioned in Wilber’s paper) is ‘forked’, where a project or text is split into different forks or streams. The result is a shift in power and authorship from academic to social and challenges notions of expertise, legitimising the notion of ‘amateur’ experts.

Participatory culture is the method in which users participate in pop culture and new literacies. This is achieved through avenues such as fan fiction, gaming and online communities. Such literacies result in the creation of original texts, organising, editing and publishing. The result is a challenge to how texts are viewed: what is a text? how is it created, shaped, re-shaped and so forth? New literacies also move into the conventional notion of space – our personal lives, work, popular culture, forums, anime, fan fiction, etc. 

There exists much tension between traditional literacies and new literacies. Studies have looked at how chools attempt to use social networks – combining traditional literacies with new literacies. The results show that technologies don’t always foster new literacies (especially in an traditional literacies context). It supports the notion that technology is often shoehorned into the classroom (producing traditional literacies), despite educators’ best interests to create new literacies.

Taking the view that new literacies can be transformative, technology has the ability to reshape education, taking it into new literacy spaces. Education itself can be remixed with new media and emerge as a new digital space. Vasudevan’s study on “digital geographies” observers the effect of new literacies on participants – who are shaping and shaped by the space around them and tech tools that they use. 

Conducting further research into digital culture, society and technology affords a chance to look at how new literacies are transformative – how media, technology and information shape our lives and are, in turn, shaped by us. 

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Do you want Google to be your cybernetic friend?

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Do you want Google to be your cybernetic friend?

Google’s vision of the future is a search engine that is your cybernetic friend. World renowned AI guru Ray Kurzweil is in charge of a project that, if it comes to fruition, will answer your questions without you even needing to ask. The idea is that combining keywords from your emails, search habits, surfing habits, and the kinds of things you have in common with friends on social networks, Google can predict what you want to know about and deliver it for you before you’ve asked. Ostensibly, this has the ability to save a lot of time and energy, however it could also be a way to drive targeted manipulation of your shopping habits.

There’s also the concern that Google is making us stupid by doing so much of the hard work for us and reducing people to passive knowledge consumers.

Morozov (been reading a bit by him lately) warns of the impending consumerism that will be the main focus of the internet in the future. He believes that Google’s ultimate goal is to provide opportunities to sell you junk through targeted shopping.

Find out more about Morozov on twitter.

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How about flipping the school instead?

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How about flipping the school instead?

The idea of flipping the classroom, albeit new, has become a somewhat cliched concept already. Teachers talk about how the classroom can be radically changed by using the internet to change the way we teach. I’m not deriding this methodology. In fact, I agree it has its merits – in that it illustrates education’s willingness to change. 

However the entrenched problem of the system itself still remains. Why are children sitting in a classroom, isolated from each other by computer screens? They are learning but what’s the point of traveling all the way to school to get on the internet? 

While some would say that the 1-on-1 tutoring and contact with the teacher is the key ingredient, it doesn’t really answer the question. Students can get that assistance in other ways, such as by a teacher on a webcam (perhaps using Google hangouts). The teacher could use a shared drawing space app to draw and write problems which the student could see while listening to the teacher’s explanation. The teacher could also refer the student to a different instructional video. Another approach would be to have students conference together and explain to each other. Or just use a dedicated forum to ask for help. The student, as well as learning about a math problem, could be learning online interaction skills and research skills while they find the answer to the problem.

Finally, the student could also be getting help from their *gasp* parents in finding ways to solve problems or answer questions they don’t understand.

Flipping the classroom is great … but it’s still a classroom. Technology has always been shoehorned into schools for more political benefit than educational benefit. Kids are learning more online away from classrooms (and away from formal education) than ever. Teachers should not be instructors. They should become a guide, a sounding board or even a safety net for when students need a boost.

Flip the education system. Remove the classroom from the picture and see how quickly kids adapt to an education that they control.

The rise of social learning …

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