New working environments require new kind of social competence

Image: Travis Isaacs

During November 26-27 a national Pedagogics Conference, Kasvatustieteen päivät (in Finnish only), was organized at the University of Tampere. I was glad to be able to attend and give a presentation there together with my long-time research colleague, Dr Marjatta Myllylä, who works as Principal Lecturer at the Vocational Teacher Education Centre in Tampere.

All of the workshops we attended (and they were not the same, we followed different sessions) seemed to approach the same theme from different angles: how is higher education taking working life requirements into account? There is a growing concern about a gap between curriculum and the life outside the university doors. I’ve written about the same thing in an earlier blog post, Curriculum and the Gap.

Not surprisingly, our topic evolved around the same theme. We talked about the changes working environment is facing: the changing communication system, network organizations, the need for distributed expertise and self-directed teams, new online tools and behaviors, globalization – all of which are contributing to the profound change of the working environment and thus also the key competences required from our graduating students. We discussed the emerging of social media and rejected the idea that it’s merely about a technical development; instead, it’s first and foremost a social phenomenon and therefore it has a significant effect on social competence requirements.

At this point, I can’t help referring to Marianne Renvall and Marjo Joshi again: our duty is to teach our students social media communication skills (see my previous post). They do need them. Collaboration in enterprises has taken a new, more complex role. It’s not enough that our students learn to communicate in English, they need to learn to collaborate online – in English or another foreign language – with people who come from different cultures and whom they don’t know from before. It goes without saying that this is much more demanding. It also goes without saying that traditional classroom teaching has very limited capacity to teach students these skills.

Tampere Vocational Teacher Education Centre is applying social media tools in its curriculum; they use Second Life as an environment for observation and practical training (of course they also have f2f practical training) and blogs for reporting and reflecting on the different phases of the teacher training process. The experiences have driven us to consider the role of social competence in online environments in more depth.

A survey made by two teacher students (Karjalainen & Junttila 2009) gives us some initial insight in this question. They conducted a study to map the experiences and opinions of students regarding Second Life as a learning environment. The results show that the attitudes are strongly polarized. Some students have a very negative, even hostile attitude towards the virtual world, whereas others can see many benefits in using it.

Interestingly, the more negative the attitude, the less well-justified the argumentation. The answers are of the type: “this is so stupid, this brings no added value, why is this forced as a learning environment when it clearly doesn’t qualify as one?” – without any explanation of why they thought it was so bad. On the other hand, the most positive answers were also most clearly based on actual experience and they listed many concrete examples of pedagogical added value (e.g. for cultural and language studies in an authentic environment, simulations, travel, science teaching etc.).

The most interesting observation – from where I stand – is this: the students saw that Second Life was an authentic environment for enhancing social skills. They found it a realistic way of interacting with people from different cultures, who they did not know from before. Moreover, they didn’t think these things could be learned at all in a classroom environment.

There are of course many aspects to the question, and I’m by no means suggesting that Second Life would be a philosopher’s stone to solve all problems at once. But I do see more and more clearly that traditional formal education has to take a look in the mirror and admit that the evolving and globalizing information society poses new types of challenges on education – and that only few of them, if any, can be answered with traditional means.

Authentic learning environments and working life requirements

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Greetings from Turku, the historical capital of Finland! I’m attending a national language teachers’ conference here. Today I gave a workshop on using web-based technologies for authentic language learning. There was a lot of discussion and I wanted to share our thoughts and the hot topics of the conference in my blog as well.

Before my workshop I attended a couple of other sessions with a message supporting my own. The first one was led by Marjatta Huhta, who is going to defend her doctoral thesis on language and communication needs for professional purposes in January. She pointed out some serious flaws in the Finnish language teaching policy: there is a profound lack of understanding in what comes to the actual working life needs in language and communication skills. She has also found out that language education has failed and fails to read the signs of time: things have changed in many ways but language education policies remain the same. We need to take action immediately if we are to have any competitive edge in the changing markets.

Marianne Renvall and Marjo Joshi from Turku University of Applied Sciences shared their experiences in a company language training project in which they have collaborated with SMEs to map their language skill needs and offer custom-designed training in language and communication skills. The experiences have also benefited the degree programmes by offering up-to-date information on working life requirements. Their studies show that the Finnish UAS graduates find that in working life they need skills they don’t think they have learned well enough during their studies. Surprisingly, these include 1) team work skills; 2) communication skills; 3) problem solving skills and 4) organization skills. Moreover, Marianne Renvall strongly emphasized that it’s our duty to teach our students online communication skills and professional use of social media. They need these skills in real life.

I don’t think many universities really understand this yet.

Just before my workshop, Anne Rongas gave an online presentation on social media tools for language learning. It was an excellent introduction to the discussion I wanted to raise with my own topic. The question is, in light of all these issues: how can we teach our students the right skills, the ones that they are really going to need in real life? Not just the right terms and grammar, but the actual working methods, real-life communication situations both online and face-to-face, team work skills, and all these things they report not to have learned well enough during their studies?

We had an interesting discussion and I’m now going to summarize the main points here, to give you an idea of what Finnish language teachers have to say about these issues.

We found it important to make a difference between the use of social media for fun and for professional purposes. The common experience was that students are familiar with many social media applications, but they lack the skills to use them professionally. They are not aware e.g. of language registers or cultural issues. Ideally these skills should be taught before higher education.

Many language teachers are skillful in using VLEs in language education. They use various tools of the VLEs, such as discussion forums, chat and wiki. However, there are not many experiences in using social media applications in language teaching yet. (Now, please, if you’re reading this and you have some experiences to share with us, please feel free to comment!)

I introduced an UAS business information systems language course concept that I have developed together with my colleague and we’re piloting it in Ning this academic year. The course is partly based on project based learning, and all online collaboration takes place in Ning. The students work in teams, starting with a real project plan, and they “form a company”, familiarize themselves with a piece of open source project management or webconferencing software and produce both written and spoken presentations on both the “company” and the software. In addition, we practice meetings and negotiations skills, job interviews, business e-mails and business terminology, as well as study information search in relevant professional blogs.

The course is still in progress, but so far the feedback has been positive. I promise I’ll post updates here!

We also talked about Second Life in language education. One of the participants had positive experiences in studying in SL. She had taken part in lectures there, and she said it had felt very real. This raised a new question: why is it that when we could do just about anything in SL, make our avatars fly or do realistic simulations of complex tasks, the teachers very often tend to create a school and make the avatars sit in a classroom or auditorium, watching a Power Point presentation? Where is out-of-the-box thinking? And, getting back to authentic learning and working life requirements, where is the workplace where the employees go sit in rows when they need to solve a problem? In this light, is it a wonder that the student report lacking team work and problem solving skills?

We also heard an example of how a traditional lecture can change and become more interactive with the help of social media applications. One of the participants told about a lecture, during which the students had used Twitter for commenting it and discussing it with each other. The teacher also followed the Twitter conversation, and the comments had a direct effect on the course of the lecture, making it truly interactive. This would not be possible in a traditional setting; you can’t just open your mouth and say you have a comment for the guy sitting next to you. Here social media helped overcome the barriers of the traditional auditorium setting.

Finally we discussed intellectual property rights and information security. A participant explained he has had a few students who refuse to use any applications that require creating a user profile. This raised a lot of discussion. Can we make our students register to services they don’t want to use? What happens when their employer requires them to use e.g. Ning for project management? If Facebook owns the rights for all the material we take there, can it be used for education? How to protect our and our students’ privacy if we wish to use it anyway?

There are lots of questions, and this post has become long and perhaps somewhat incoherent. I hope it still makes sense and helps us to further develop these ideas. All comments are more than welcome.

I’d like to conclude with a couple of questions Marianne Renvall and Marjo Joshi introduced in their presentation:

Do you think your university/school takes working life requirements into account in education? How about your own teaching?

Do you think that students have a realistic idea of what kinds of language and communication challenges they are going to face in their future work? How does it affect their motivation to study these skills?

Sustainable investments in education

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I just read the leading article by the editor Anver Versi in African Business (Oct 2009) in which he discussed competitiveness and standard of living in different countries. The message of the article was clear: invest in education and all else will follow.

As educators we of course are happy to nod our heads and agree with Mr. Versi. Of course we must invest in education. I’m from Finland, one of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world which is more or less famous for its high level of education, so it’s easy for me to agree. It’s also easy for me to use this as an excuse for self-satisfaction and the feeling that I’m doing fine, it’s the others who need to do something about things. It’s the business of governments in some other countries, it has nothing to do with me.

But you know, I think there’s much more to Mr. Versi’s message than just that. Of course investing in education is something governments must do, I’m not saying it’s not. But I believe that investing in education can – and should – go beyond financial issues. Pedagogical innovation, staff development, curriculum development and staying updated on the changing requirements of the society and the working life are also investments in education. They are what product development is for industry. Doing the same thing year after year, sticking to routine and refusing to react to the changing environment is not an investment in education.

Let’s compare it with the car industry in Europe during the socialist era. The Trabants remained more or less the same for decades. There didn’t seem to be any need for product development. It was the most widely sold car in the socialist Eastern European countries, why change it? The result was, of course, that the Trabant no longer met the requirements of the consumers when the world and the political system changed and people suddenly had a choice, and the factories were closed in 1991.

I’m working in a joint education development project with the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and what I see there is the exact opposite of the we-don’t-need-no-change attitude. The aim of our project is to improve the accessibility of teacher education especially in rural areas of Tanzania, and thus help improving the quality of secondary education in the country. My colleagues at DUCE (Dar es Salaam University College of Education) and CVL (Centre for Virtual Learning) are employing innovative teaching methods and education technology to make the education as accessible and high-quality as possible. They haven’t developed large-scale e-learning programmes before, but they are willing to learn new things and work hard to achieve their goals and serve their students’ needs. This is a great example of a combination of the two types of investing in education; material and immaterial. The material is not enough.

If we don’t invest in education by developing it to meet the actual needs of the people receiving it, we are doing the Trabant mistake. What happened to them can no doubt happen to us. Our “product”, education, is one of the most valuable things there is, let’s treat it accordingly.

Self-directed learning + Full teacher control = Impossible

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If you are a teacher in higher education, I’m sure you cannot escape the discussion evolving around social media these days. It’s just everywhere. Some teachers are really enthusiastic about the whole thing whereas others wouldn’t hear of it. But the most curious group of teachers are the ones who feel like it’s something that should be used in education, but at the same time they’re afraid of it.

The problems they see in social media are numerous. I teach online pedagogy both to student teachers and to staff members at our university, and in addition to that I follow the discussion in many forums related to the issue, so I hear about these a lot. Some teachers fear that social media applications are too addictive, some think they ruin the real social relations of the students, some find the information security issues alarming, some don’t want to trust a third-party service provider with education-related functions – just to name a few concerns.

But let me tell you something: there’s big chance that the real bogey man is actually the loss of teacher control. When the students use social media applications like Facebook, Ning or Twitter for interacting, networking and learning, the teacher has no way of controlling all that happens. Compare that with the use of e.g. Moodle, where the teacher can track every move of each student, control the discussions, determine the learning content, assign roles, supervise, monitor, watch over the students. You can’t do this in social media applications, now can you?

I didn’t make this up, I heard an education technology company representative say it. He said it because there was a solution, an incredible solution for teachers who suffer from this fear but would still like to use social media because it’s nice for collaborative learning. Guess what the solution is?

It’s a combination of social media elements and full teacher control: the school’s own, restricted access “Facebook”. It’s got all the functions of the real thing, but it’s not open for anyone outside the institution that uses it. It’s for students and staff only. It can only be accessed with the university’s user ID and password. Hallelujah, a perfect solution! The students can do all the fun networking stuff with the teacher being able to monitor what’s happening! No more uncertainty. Everybody’s happy.

Except that it doesn’t work. It’s not social media. How long does it take for us teachers to understand this: social media is not a technology. It’s not a set of tools! It’s not the technical solutions for sharing photos or joining fun groups or updating your status or adding friends to your list or commenting on what other people say. It’s the people using these functions. It’s social behavior. It does not exist without the community that uses the technology, out of their free will, spontaneously. It cannot be built artificially.

Besides, what’s the point with linking with people you interact with anyway? What added value does it bring that instead of talking to your fellow students in the classroom, you talk to the very same people online? The whole point of social media applications is the amazing possibility to link with the outside world, with people you wouldn’t have a chance to meet with otherwise. Why follow only your classmates on Twitter when you can follow the CEO of the firm you’d like to work at, your favorite author, or even the President?

We keep talking about the importance of self-directed learning, collaboration, student initiative, informal learning and ownership of one’s learning process. All these things require one thing from the teacher: the courage to step aside and trust the students. We need to guide them, encourage them and help them learn, but we don’t need to control their every move. Surveillance and restriction belong to the industrial age communication system. The world’s way beyond that, and it’s about time the school starts to follow.

Social Media in Education – Where did the “Social” go?

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A few days ago I attended a seminar on the use of social media in education. I had high hopes in advance – especially as the participants were informed that the venue had changed as there were so many people coming we couldn’t fit in the smaller auditorium that had first been announced. I was very pleased to notice that an important topic like this had raised interest among the educators in the area where I live.

After the seminar I’m not quite as pleased anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I still do think it was great that such a seminar was organized. The problem however is in how the question of social media in education is being discussed and answered. It seems to me that the core of the matter is systematically ignored or misunderstood.

Why is that? Let me explain.

The seminar focused on introducing social media tools to the teachers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s good to find out about microblogging, online communities, virtual worlds, webconferencing and video/photo/link sharing applications. It’s also good to hear about examples of how these are already being used in learning.

In connection with the introduction to the tools there was  a task for the participants which included considering which social media tool could be used for a given educational function. A list of both was provided. Again, absolutely nothing wrong with the idea as such. No doubt such and exercise activated the audience to think about the presented tools from their own perspective. However, it was the set list of educational functions I found somewhat disturbing.

There is a great danger that teachers fall into the pit of tool-centered thinking. Social media applications are seen as tools one might choose or choose not to use to perform the same functions that have earlier been performed with something else, like the school LMS or PowerPoint slides or blackboard or lecturing or handouts or whatever. There is an idiom in Finland that can freely be translated as “climbing the tree butt first”. It means doing things in an illogical manner or upside down. I think it’s what is largely happening for educators when approaching social media.

But the engine really started coughing when we were faced with an essential question: why use social media in education in the first place?

The answers to this question included the following, in this order:

1) The students might already be familiar with these tools so they would be easy for them to use.
2) It’s good to offer online education to enable effective distance education.
3) The learning process can be more transparent when using them.
4) Students learn about information security issues, net identity and immaterial property rights in a secure environment.

Now I’m not saying these are not valid points (apart from number 2 which is not a valid point. There is plenty of online distance education available which has absolutely nothing at all to do with social media. The school LMS is not social media.). There’s still a big problem – not with what is being said but with what is left unsaid.

It is true that students might already be familiar with social media – but then what? They might be familiar with net poker or online shopping as well, but I don’t think anyone of us would think of using these for education just because of that. It is true that it’s good to offer online distance education, but as I said, online distance education doesn’t need to have (and most often hasn’t) anything to do with social media. True, the learning process might become more transparent – but it might be the case also when using the school LMS. And yes, sure, of course students need to learn about information security, net identity and immaterial property rights, but again, they can also do so without social media being involved.

These are just not good enough reasons. Again, social media applications are seen as (cool) new tools.  The most important point – as a matter of fact, the essence of social media – is being missed.

First of all, social media is not a technical development. It’s not a set of tools. As Clay Shirky puts it, it’s a revolution. But even as a revolution it’s not a technical one. The name says it clear enough, and so says Shirky: revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technology, but when it adopts new behavior. It’s social media, i.e. media to be used for implementing social behavior.  Stephen Downes (who was one of the first to use the concept of eLearning 2.0) points out that the emergence of Web 2.0 is not a technological revolution or a technology; it is a social revolution and an attitude. Social media as a phenomenon is more about social sciences than technology.

It means that instead of using new tools for doing the same thing, people now do new things that simply can’t be done with the old tools. The new activities are the core, not the new tools.

This should also be the guideline when thinking of social media in education. Phenomena such as open content, Creative Commons licences, open network organizations, connectivism, and distributed expertise in the form of blogging, tweeting, sharing and discussing cannot just be ignored. They are bound to have an effect on the way people understand learning, expertise and knowledge – in other words, education. The motivation for integrating social media in education should derive from this.

References:

Downes, S. (2005). E-Learning 2.0. In eLearn Magazine, Oct. 16, 2005.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody. Penguin Press, US.

Learning environments’ new clothes – or how to localise e-learning?

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Today I attended a Cross-cultural User Experience Seminar at Tampere University of Technology. The approach of the seminar was mainly from the viewpoint of product design and international marketing. There were really interesting talks about user experience studies in different sides of the globe, such as Korea, Jordan, Brazil and Tanzania. Although I’m no designer, I found the ideas useful and listened to the presentations with great interest.

The speakers introduced many viewpoints, but they all seemed to agree on two things:

1) Cross-cultural design and localisation are crucial for the product to be well received in different cultures
2) There is no clear set of guidelines how the localisation should be done, all designers must consider the cultural aspect from the starting-point of their product and according to the situation.

During the seminar, I started to think about the business of localisation and cultural issues in terms of education and especially e-learning. If web services and user interfaces of commercial products require careful and insightful localisation – if this is ignored, the marketing results might be catastrophic – why wouldn’t this apply to e-learning tools? How are cultural issues taken into consideration when designing an online learning environment and e-learning modules?

I work as a project manager for a teacher education development project with University of Dar es Salaam, and I’ve seen a Tanzanian adaptation of Moodle being used in a way very familiar to me, although the cultural differences between Finland and Tanzania otherwise are extensive. The sight of the learning environment I know so well was like a touch of home in Africa – I know this sounds stupid but that’s how it felt! Only the colours were different; whereas here in Finland we tend to be very reserved with our colour choices (our university’s Moodle is greyish blue), the Tanzanian version shined with sunny earth colours. I had expected the differences to be deeper than that!

Gilbert Cockton introduced a research by PhD student Leonard Mengo of Jomo Kenyata University, Kenya. He had got some interesting results on the importance of cultural markers in educational material in electronic educational material. Mr Mengo had tested two versions of the exact same study material on management with Kenyan students: the original version was produced in the UK, but he made a Kenyan adaptation of it by changing nothing but colours, images, music, voice-overs and other cultural markers. The content and structure remained untouched. The result was that the Kenyan version was better received by the students – however, the UK version was not disadvantaged either. The cultural markers had a positive effect, but not a dramatic one.

It’s like with the Tanzanian Moodle. There are cultural markers present, but the content and the learning process are the same as in its Finnish cousin. The students’ behaviour doesn’t seem much different. Is the process of learning something so inherited in us, so deeply carved in our dna that it’s just something that needs no localisation? Or has the concepts of “school” and “studying” become universally rooted in our collective memory? Well, maybe I’ll find I’m totally wrong when the Tanzanian students start with the study programme we’re now developing.

Then I came to think of something that makes us see the localisation business in a whole different light: what about the localisation of social media applications? What about Facebook and MySpace? They are hugely popular all over the world, with not much localisation apart from language translations. Facebook has more than 300 million active users, out of whom 70% are from outside the US where the application was developed.

What is it that makes these sites gain such amazing popularity that most designers can only dream about? Surely it’s not an outstanding usability or extraordinary technology? To be honest, from time to time their usability leaves quite a deal to be desired. It has to be something else.

When digging a bit deeper we’ll see the groundbreaking difference between the observations on Moodle and other learning modules and Facebook or other social media applications. It’s exactly the opposite.

Whereas with Moodle the wrapping is localised but the content remains the same, with Facebook the wrapping is similar but the content is always localised. Not just localised, personalised. It’s always localised, because people create it themselves. Therefore it’s always relevant in its context. The same goes for tools like MySpace, or WordPress, or any other social media application. It’s brilliant, isn’t it.

Imagine the impact of such rich resources on education! Instead of standard ways of organising standard information in a linear format you can have a flexible forum suitable for different cultural needs.

Am I getting carried away? You know, I have just been accused of being a “naive technology believer” by a colleague – and I don’t want to claim that the development of social media tools would solve all problems and bring peace to the world. But I am claiming that the impact this development has already had and will have on human behaviour is dramatic. I think this is one more aspect to prove it.

Curriculum and The Gap

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I’m so glad someone finally has the guts to talk about things with their real names! What I’m referring to is a recent research conducted at the University of Helsinki by Erja Vitikka. Her doctoral thesis brings into daylight an awkward problem in our PISA believer society: the comprehensive school curriculum does not support the learning process. (Unfortunately I could only find the news about her research in Finnish)

Vitikka points out that the current curriculum leads to mechanic learning of isolated pieces of knowledge. She found out that the subjects being taught are lacking connection to each other and that the learning methods do not correspond with the problem-solving and information processing skills needed outside school, especially in working life.  Moreover, learning is restricted to the formal school context and the content determined by the school. Informal learning is not recognized and the school is alienated from the natural learning environment.

What really strikes me here – and what should really be taken seriously – is the gap between school context and school working methods and the skills needed in working life. The huge impact of the somewhat artificial school context can clearly be seen in young university students when trying to expose them to a more working-life relevant working style. They find it very hard to adjust to a studying context that differs from the sitting-in-a-row-and-taking-notes-as-the-teacher-speaks format. A friend and a colleague of mine once got a student feedback that said: “the teacher’s place is in the front, next to the blackboard, not next to the students disturbing them”. She had tried to make the students work in teams, herself going from team to team offering advise if needed.

There is not one single company where the workers would solve problems sitting in a row, each one trying to solve the problem alone, listening to someone speak. I think this much we all agree on!

What should be done then? How can schools narrow the gap? Vitikka also comes up with a recipe for this in her research. She recommends that different learning environments, diverse tools and learning methods as well as social media applications should be taken into consideration in the curriculum.

Not because they are fun or fashionable or because kids like them. But because they represent authentic learning of our days.

Teachers Burying Heads in Sand?

This morning I came across a blog post written yesterday by Chris Lake; “25 things journalists can do to future-proof their careers”.  According to the article, many journalists are worried about the future of their careers, especially the ones working for offline publications – with good reason. Chris Lake points out that even in the changing society there is a future for journalists, but only if they are willing to learn new skills and adapt to the changes of the industry.

The really interesting thing about the post is that you could substitute the word “journalist” with the word “teacher”, and the word “write” with the word “teach”, and still make a valid point. Give it a try! I especially like this paragraph:

“As much as anything it is a cultural shift: a mental challenge for traditional journalists. And I’m not just talking about 20-year veterans of the industry, but those young pups who have completed their NCTJ courses and moved into the world of local journalism. To many, despite their youth, the internet is a thoroughly alien place. But more and more journalists will end up writing online, and they need to embrace it while they still have the choice to do so.”

Read it using the words “teacher”, “teacher qualification courses” and “local schools”, and you see the point.

Now why would this apply to teaching? Journalism is a whole different thing; surely nothing can affect something as established as teaching, right? Exactly where is the difference? Delivering the news is traditionally a highly valued occupation. Like teachers, journalists are traditionally seen as the corner stones of information, objectivity, instruction and culture in the society. In some cases newspapers have become national institutions. If they can be shaken by the forces changing the society, what would make schools immune to them?

Yet there is one major difference between the original story about journalists and my version adapted to teachers. We find it as we get back to the introduction: “a number of journalists are concerned about the sustainability of their careers”. They have seen what’s going on. They understand that the changes taking place cannot be reversed, and the only way to avoid sinking is starting to swim. As Chris Lake writes: “It isn’t game over for journalism, not by a stretch, it’s just that the game is changing. Old media journalists will need to learn some new skills and adapt mindsets to accommodate changes in their industry. “

Can’t help thinking of the Finnish language teachers I referred to in my earlier post; Bad Grammar on the Net (And Who’s to Blame for It?)

Ostriches are often thought to bury their heads in sand when facing a threatening situation, imagining it’ll pass if they don’t look – but no, they are not that stupid. Are we?

(Image by Mikee Showbiz)

Bad Grammar on the Net (And Who’s to Blame for It)

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I know teachers are often hated for saying this, but I can’t help paying attention to bad grammar. Now I don’t mean things like minor errors in punctuation or occasional wrong article choices, I mean really bad grammar. I mean the kind of writing that makes the writer appear more stupid than he or she actually is. My native language is Finnish and I teach English, so I read lots of texts in both languages; students’ texts, articles, magazines, advertising, announcements, e-mails, reports – you name it. And especially the texts in Finnish are alarming: it’s as if the writing skills of the nation had suddenly disappeared.

At this point you probably wonder if I’m really going to dedicate this post to complaining about bad Finnish grammar. How is this related to information society and education? Don’t worry; it is.

As I said, I’ve been desperate with some students’ writing. How can it be that students of a university of applied sciences write e-mails as if they were writing an SMS or a chat message to their friends? A colleague of mine who teaches Finnish at our university said she had encouraged the students to practice their writing skills by writing blogs, but the results had been catastrophic: the students had written in slang, using vulgar expressions.

I was astonished. Why was this? Real-life blogs are, almost without an exception, very well written. How, oh how can it be even possible that a university student is utterly incapable of polite, well-written electronic communication – or even of behaving in an adult-like manner online? And I was sick and tired of hearing the same old arguments: “It’s because of this terrible text-messaging culture”, or “It’s because they only write pointless messages in Irc or-whatever-that-is, they don’t write good old letters anymore”. Why would they write letters? It would take 2 days for the letter to reach the recipient and another 2 for the answer to come.

A few days ago I read about a research that was conducted in Finland, and suddenly it was all clear. Here are the stunning results:

“3 of 4 Finnish teachers in Junior high do not know how to use Skype, Messenger or Irc. Moreover, they are not willing to learn. They do not believe they need to be familiar with the media used by junior high students”. Not willing to learn? Not interested in the media their students use? Did I understand this correctly? The research also reveals that the texts studied in junior high are remarkably different from the texts the young students read and produce in their free time. The media used in teaching are traditional; texts in wikis, blogs or online discussions are not used in teaching.

Maybe I’m stupid but I just wish to ask a simple question: how can the students learn that the Internet is not just a playground where you can use teenager speech, but that it’s the by far most important forum of professional communication on almost every field, if their school teachers keep understating Internet?

Resulting from this, let me ask another simple question: this being the case, how can the students learn to communicate politely in the Internet?

I’m not saying that the teachers are the only ones to blame, of course a student using vulgar language should be able to figure out that it’s not appropriate – common sense should be enough for that. And of course smart students are able to apply the writing skills acquired using other types of texts when writing a blog or an e-mail. But I do see a huge gap between teaching methods and curricula and the real world (once again!).

I wouldn’t have believed that the situation is quite this bad. It makes me very sad and frustrated. When do we teachers learn that we cannot hold the time still? There is no point in closing one’s eyes and holding tight to the old ways of communication. Our duty is to help young people gain the skills and knowledge needed in the society, and if we refuse to admit that Internet communication skills belong in this category we are either blind or stupid or both.

Here’s the link to the news about the research. Unfortunately it’s only in Finnish.
http://www.iltasanomat.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/uutinen.asp?id=1717113

10 Years: Warp in Spacetime

Image by Misterteacher

The autumn semester has just started in universities in Finland. The students haven’t arrived yet, instead the first weeks of the semester are busy with planning the new courses and getting everything in order, and, of course, recovering from the summer holiday. This is my anniversary year: this is my 10th autumn at TAMK University of Applied Sciences (well, it’s my 10th autumn as a teacher anywhere). This is also the 10th year I start a new English course with a new group of engineering students. (Actually I only just counted it, I guess I’ll have to celebrate this somehow!)

Anyway, the point being: I realize things have not changed all that much during these 10 years. They should have, shouldn’t they? Things change in 10 years. I bet for many of us the first things that come to mind are technical innovations. Taking a few simple examples from our daily lives, this is of course true. 10 years ago I still used a printed phone book, had to check my fitness club timetable on a printed brochure, and – God forbid – enrolled in university exams with a form in an envelope. At our university the teachers’ weekly timetables were physically mapped in a folder which was available in a certain room. Doing things and acquiring information required much more coming and going and searching. Now, of course, we find all this information online and use online tools for many things we used to do on-spot.

But this is not what I mean. If we take a closer look at all these and similar examples, the only change is that the tools have become more sophisticated. But they are still used for doing the exact same things as we did before, like checking a timetable, enrolling to an exam or finding contact information. The things we do in these cases have not changed. Tools, of course, have developed throughout the entire history of human race, there’s nothing new in that.

What is new is the way we deal with information. If we think of the concept of expertise, professional and non-professional networks, communicating, sharing and creating information and keeping in touch with friends and business associates we suddenly see the real difference.

Instead of just reading articles, any one of us can write a blog and create one. We can connect with professionals all over the globe by using applications like LinkedIn or Twitter. We use Skype of Facebook for communicating with faraway friends and groups of friends. We can make new friends with people sharing the same hobby. I just think of the number of scuba divers or metal music fans I’ve met online! Hierarchies disappear as people follow each other on Twitter because of the interesting things they have to say, not because of their status within a given organization. The entire conception of information and expertise has changed irreversably. This, my friends, is not technical development. This is a paradigm shift.

Now, getting back to the university and the new semester, the 10th one. When the new students arrive, they are still led to auditoriums to listen to mass lectures. They’ll still sit in a row in the classroom, listening to the teacher speak, taking notes so that they can later study for the written exam. Maybe the teacher is not using the blackboard or overhead projector anymore but PowerPoint or something else instead, but it’s still the same thing. Maybe they are using a virtual learning environment, but in most cases, it’s still the same thing. The teacher distributes the material (it doesn’t make a big difference if it’s a handout or a PDF!) and determines the learning tasks, which all lead towards the exam week. We can talk about learner-centered pedagogy and collaborative learning, but how well do they correspond with the actual every day university life? How do we manage to promote working in expert teams, creative collaboration and lifelong learning? I’m telling you, many of our students still believe that after graduating as engineers they will somehow be “ready”.

I’m sure you can see the point. Of course I’m not saying this is the case everywhere, 100%, but if we’re honest we must admit that by far in most cases it is. It’s as if the world outside has been evolving with no effect on formal education. Inside the walls of the university the time stands still. There’s a warp in the spacetime. The 10 years that have profoundly changed the way things work in professional life has had barely any effect on the way we deliver formal education. The question is, how long will we manage to provide something that young people will find useful for building their careers?

I just know I’m going to have to make this 10th year different. And I’m quite sure I’m not the only education professional thinking of these issues. I don’t think it’s too late – yet – to catch up with the real life, but if we close our eyes and play down the significance of the changes taking place right in front of our face, we’re doomed.