#11: Being Smart on the Net

This past week's reading, Howard Rheingold's Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, felt very familiar with its tips on how to be an empowered user instead of a passive receiver. Mr. Rheingold offered five areas of advice, which the Doodles crew has touched upon at some point or other this semester:

1. Attention: Johnson's The Information Diet offers two chapters, "The Symptoms of Information Obesity" and "Attention Fitness," which convey similar thoughts as Rheingold's text.
2. Crap Detection: While Johnson offers advice on filtering, the Halo Effect activity--development of a web resource evaluation checklist--provided the best lesson in detection crap on the web.
3. Participation: I learned a lot about being a community participant in EDIT 784, Designing for Community Participation. Participation also occurs through weekly blog comments, class discussions, and peer feedback.
4. Collaboration: Renee Hobbs' Copyright Clarity offers practical advice on how to collaborate with copyrighted owners to build upon their work--without asking for permission or making payment--via fair use determination to build up. The theory of situated cognition and Vygotsky's ideas about the development of higher thinking processes also speak to the importance of social, collaborative learning.
5. Net Smarts: Knowing how to navigate small and large networks, make connections via social media, and build a bridge between networks is crucial to strengthening our own networks.

Above all, these items are skills that must be coached and modeled in the classroom context. We cannot expect our learners to come into and leave our classrooms as masters in focused attention, judging crap, participating, collaborating, and networking. Take these two scenarios:

• Teacher A has not trained her students in the Net Smart skills. She assigns a research project two days before Thanksgiving Break. It is a group project that must be completed before break. Instead of using their time wisely, most students decide to talk about their Thanksgiving Break plans, while the try-hards do all the work. Why can't they just watch a movie already?
• Teacher B has modeled and coached Net Smart skills. He clearly indicates group members' roles and responsibilities, and distributes a rubric for participation and collaboration. Students use a web evaluation rubric to search and filter good resources for their project needs. They have clear guidelines to keep their attention on the task at hand, and frequently monitor their own collaboration and participation.

Are you Teacher A or Teacher B? Wrangling--err, teaching--teens before any holiday break is like herding cats, but the explicit teaching of information processes can hopefully ease that burden.

#10: Boomers vs. Zoomers (Synthesis)

Have you heard the trendy phrase “OK, boomer,” which has been making its rounds in casual conversation, on NPR, and in Twitter posts? It is the response that occurs when a “boomer”--usually a baby boomer, but could be any adult--gives advice or relays platitudes to younger individuals of the Millennial or Gen Z generations. 

·       “You shouldn’t spend so much time on your phone--it’ll rot your brain.” “OK, boomer.”

·       “You can’t collaborate on tests in the real world.” “OK, boomer.”

·       “You can’t find everything on Google.” “OK, boomer.”

·       “You should read this article on why ‘OK, boomer’ shouldn’t be used.” “OK, boomer.” (This one actually happened between a student and his parent.)

·       “I’m going to write a blog about boomers vs. Zoomers.” “Ok, boomer.”

My students, the Gen Z-ers or “Zoomers,” are using “OK, boomer” in any situation they can. Urban Dictionary defines a “Zoomer” as an individual of Gen Z who has grown up in an age of rapidly changing technology, the Internet, and increasing interconnectivity of the world; changes happen (zoom) just as we have become used to the current technology. Zoomers are digital natives who have been copying, collaborating, communicating, creating, and sharing on digital channels from a young age. Collaborating...communicating...creating--sound familiar? 

Why can’t Zoomers take the heat from boomers? Is it that they cannot accept criticism or are too emotionally sensitive (see “snowflake”)? Or is it simply that they have a different way of consuming and using information than previous generations? I am inclined to believe that it is the latter. Yes, our students want quick answers and they know how to Google just about anything, BUT a search engine cannot teach good searching and sorting skills. Yes, our students would rather be on their phones than think critically, BUT a social media post or copyrighted material could be a great starting point for a critical thinking lesson (fair use, anyone?). Yes, there will always be too much information for consumption, BUT a smartphone cannot give “wait time” to process information. 

There are some things that technology can do better than teachers, but there are also many things that teachers (and humans) can do better than technology. Zoomers know how to use the tech. It’s simply good design to offer a learning environment where they can develop healthier and authentic information using skills in the safe environment of school before they face real world, adult consequences.

#9: The Copy-Frights and Copy-Rights of Users

Last week, I attended Igniting Innovation, a FCPS conference focused on blended learning. As I was exploring the creation tool Adobe Spark, I was flat out told by a FCPS SBTS that students should never use copyrighted music in their own work. Now, I didn’t want to toot my own horn during someone else’s presentation, but I recently read some information that contradicts that statement. 

My biggest takeaway from Renee Hobbs’ Copyright Clarity is that the general public is grossly uninformed about copyright law and the fair use exemption--myself included. Hobbs gives several examples of educators who are just not sure how to interpret copyright law and avoid using another’s intellectual property--“copyfright”--even if it could lead to better educational outcomes. Owners and publishers make it really hard for creators to get good information about how fair use actually works. Fair use guidelines and educational copyright curricula are written by those who profit from copyrights--the owners and publishers--and are interpretations of the law. So what is the law?

Fair use allows users to legally use copyrighted material without paying or asking permission from the copyright holders (Hobbs, p. 16). It is up to the users to think critically about the use of copyrighted material. In considering the specific nature and situation of copying, teachers and students can make a fair use determination for themselves. Users must consider the “transformativeness” of their new work. Hobbs asks us to consider: 

• Has the user added value or repurposed the work? (p. 41)
• Is the user using only what is necessary to accomplish his or her goals? (p. 55)
• Will the use of copyrighted material(s) affect the owner’s ability to profit? (p. 55)
• Does the specific use benefit society more than it hurts the (C) holder? (p. 73)

As a teacher of students who use and share copyrighted material every single day, it is my duty to make sure that students are informed about how to interpret fair use. For students, copying is a valuable part of their learning process. In examining the works of others, students learn to criticize and create their own interpretations. In Chapter 3, “Users Have Rights, Too,” Hobbs highlights the value of copying in the learning process: it “contributes to the development of skills like...synthesis” (p. 12). Hmm...isn’t synthesis the last step in the DDLS Information Using process? So students do actually need to use copyrighted material as a bridge to create their own meaning of the world! 

Also, look at society’s role models: what Youtube stars, what music artists, what politicians aren’t copying and reusing the work of others nowadays? If you aren’t familiar with the newest social media craze, TikTok, here’s a pretty fabulous compilation of Tiktok videos, in which creators repurposed 50 Cent’s 2005 hit “Candy Shop” for their own entertainment. Is 50 Cent losing profits on this? Is the nature of this work transformative? The users have made a determination in favor of their own fair use of the content.