ICT’s: Complement or Substitute to F2F?

Something I have been noticing in my own virtual connections is that, whether on Facebook or Twitter, I am conversing more and more with people I associate with IRL. I’ve been wondering why this is, and I think it has to do with the mainstreaming of these two social networks. When I began using FB in 2007 and Twitter in 2008, they were still the domains of early adopters, who tended to be geographically dispersed. However, as these social networks have moved into the mainstream, there are many more people who I associated with face to face on a regular basis that I also communicate with in these forums. ICT’s have always been a great way to geographically shrink the world, and I certainly do still have strong connections with people on the other side of the world that I have never met f2f. But increasingly my inner trusted virtual circle – the people who I have the most interactive discussions with – are people who I am in fairly close physical proximity to.

In the language of economics, the core question is whether face-to-face interactions and electronic connections are substitutes or complements
In our original paper, we argued that the number of human interactions was hardly a zero-sum game, and more electronic interactions didn’t have to mean fewer meetings face-to-face.

If the new media increased the number of relationships – the connectedness of the world – more than it decreased personal meetings within any given relationship, then better electronic communications could increase the number of face-to-face meetings.

In later research and in my book “Triumph of the City” (The Penguin Press, 2011), I emphasized a slightly different idea: electronic connections and face-to-face connections are complements because new technologies increase the returns to innovation.

Better electronic interactions make it easier to produce new ideas in low-cost areas (think New York fashion designers’ ideas that are manufactured in China) or to sell creativity worldwide (think the global success of “Avatar”), and that means bigger returns to innovation.

As long as interpersonal contact – the sharing of knowledge at close quarters – remains an important ingredient in innovation (as it seemed to be in Facebook), then better electronic connections can make face-to-face contact, and innovation-assisting cities, more important.

We also cited earlier research that found that people tended to call people who were physically close: in the 1970s, more than 40 percent of phone calls connected places less than two miles apart. More recent data from Japan confirmed that proximity and phoning seemed to complement each other.

It shouldn’t be surprising that people both call and meet with their friends, and that suggests a certain kind of complementarity.

Another piece of evidence suggesting that information technology and face-to-face contact are complements is the geographic concentration of the tech cluster. America’s cutting-edge computer scientists have access to the best electronic means of long-distance connection, yet they have come together to form the world’s most famous industrial cluster: Silicon Valley.

A similar cluster exists in Bangalore.

In my own industry as well, there is little evidence that long-distance learning is eliminating demand for the high-intensity in-person education that places like Princeton and Yale provide. Anyone who teaches knows that good lecturing is far more than proclaiming wisdom from on high.

The teacher constantly struggles to understand what is getting across, and that’s far easier at close quarters. The more complex the idea, the more you need to rely on the rich cues that humans have evolved for signaling confusion or comprehension.

Humanity is a profoundly social species, with a deep ability to learn from people nearby. I believe that the future will only make that asset more important.

Read more at economix.blogs.nytimes.com

 

 

Using a wiki to collaboratively create course curriculum

I like this case study. It’s not from post-sec, but K-12, and the interview with the educators was done by Wikispaces so they have an interest in promoting wiki technology in a positive light. However, that said, it is still a great example of how educators living at a distance used a wiki to collaborate and develop an OER based on the Grade 6 social studies curriculum in Ontario. It also illustrates the benefits of being open, as the teachers involved sent out a tweet about their final result, which was picked up by the Wikispaces staff, who then interviewed the teachers and hilighted their wiki on their site – which was read by me, and is now being sent out to my network. Their work gets pushed around various networks and amplified, based on a single tweet that they sent.

Amplify’d from www.wikispaces.com
However, as we began to work on the project, we needed a way to share ideas, and work on pulling the assignment together without meeting in person as we all lived a distance away from each other.
We wanted to reach more educators than only those in our faculty and within the first week of our unit being posted, we had other universities’ and your own recognition!
Rachel: As part of our IT course, we were all required to open Twitter accounts and we were encouraged to use it as a way to connect and collaborate with other educators. We were all very excited about our completed wiki so we decided to “tweet” about it. The fact that you found us through Twitter demonstrates first-hand the power of Web 2.0 tools and how effective they are for connecting and sharing with others around the globe.
Marsha: We learned so much for this experience beyond just how to create a unit of study. By jumping right in and being willing to try new things, we really discovered the value of technology in education and one’s own professional development. Now that we have each had experience with creating Wikispaces, we have been able to implement them in a practical way in the classroom and have experimented with its many uses.
Not having integrated vast amounts of technology before, we have realized its potential as educators through the power of collaboration and its use for professional development and its power for our students and their continued learning.
It becomes really difficult when the school isn’t equipped with technology and when— if you’re in a community that is accepting of the idea of integrating technology, I think that that just allows so much growth for your students.
And I think, too, with traditional education, when you think of online games and Web tools and, you know, doing things like this with technology, that it’s not “educational,” and that it’s more just fun, and you’re playing online. But we learned that there are tons of games and tools and resources online, and even just different technological tools that you can use in you classroom that are educational, depending on how you use them and what you want the kids to get out of it.
So if you’re learning from it and enjoying it, then imagine what the students will get from it.
you don’t know if it’s going to work until you’ve tried.
And don’t expect it to be the same experience that someone else had, because you go in, and it’s all trial and error. Does this work, and does that work, and we found that the best way to learn was to play with things ourselves instead of having the instructor sit beside us and set everything up for us, it was so much more, “See what works for you.”

Read more at www.wikispaces.com

 

 

Wikipedia to build an OER platform

Good move by Wikipedia to help develop tools educators can use. By engaging the academic & teaching community, Wikipedia could actually become a much more substantive and “credible” resource. Plus by engaging educators in the act of editing Wikipedia and using them to introduce Wikipedia to their students as contributors and not just users, I can see these resources expanding the Wikipedia contributor user base as more students and educators become engaged in not only using, but contributing, to Wikipedia.

Amplify’d from chronicle.com

As Wikipedia hits its 10th year of operation, it is making efforts to involve academics more closely in its process. The latest is a new plan to build an “open educational resource platform” that will gather tools about teaching with Wikipedia in the classroom.

Rodney Dunican, education programs manager for Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent company, is part of the team working to build the platform, which he said will highlight the ways in which Wikipedia can be used to improve student learning.

“We don’t want them to cite Wikipedia,” he said of students. “What we really want them to do is understand how to use and critically evaluate the articles on Wikipedia and then learn how to contribute to make those articles better.”

Read more at chronicle.com