Folk Devils or Angels?

I like this phrase (today) – Are games (such as Minecraft) Folk Devils or Angels?

Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our communities. Over the last two decades alone, children have lost eight hours of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play a week.

From 1997 to 2003, children’s time spent outdoors fell 50 percent, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. In the same period – organised play (adult generated and policed) increased by 50% and TV watching went from 30 minutes to 3 hours. A decade later, research suggests that computer and video games are now a significant part of time children spend playing.

The era of modern video games began in the 1970s when Atari sold a home console which allowed consumers to buy games in the same way they bought books and music. Debates emerged immediately as to the potential good and bad that would come from these digital folk devils. Since then, computer and video games have been immersed in on-going debate which is connected to societal interest and concern in education, culture, media, economics, technology and so on – today that debate is carried willingly in the 24/7 fear-attention media economy, so it feels more intense – because if we are concerned – the filter-bubble which is adept at reflecting our emotions and interests, tells us so.

Is this form of play preventing them ‘going outside’? or is it perhaps a reaction to the lack of time they have to explore their creativity and imagination or simply something to stave off boredom and avoid reality?

Figures show that those growing up in the during the 1970s and 1980s enjoyed more than two hours of outside play each weekday, and a further nine hours at weekends – whatever the weather. But, this too is a folk tale. Studies continue to report that parents don’t make going outside possible (despite their affinity with the sentiment). Play is a mysterious activity children engage in when not compelled to spend every hour under adult supervision.

According to Rosa Brooks, children are in a lose-lose situation.

They’re forced, prematurely, to do all the un-fun kinds of things adults do (Be over-scheduled! Have no downtime! Study! Work!). But they don’t get any of the privileges of adult life: autonomy, the ability to make their own choices, use their own judgment, maybe even get interestingly lost now and then.

 

Somehow, we’ve managed to turn childhood into a long, hard slog. Is it any wonder our kids take their pleasures where they can find them, by escaping to “Grand Theft Auto IV” or the alluring, parent-free world.

In particular, Minecraft seems to have polarized parent opinion in new ways. We’re used to hearing about parent worries about GTA, COD and so on, but Minecraft? It’s not overly violent, no language issues and certainly not sexual. No, it’s addictive – but for reasons that seem hard to pinpoint – as it’s not chemical and entirely voluntary … but why suggest “habitual use of digital media” when we can point at a game and assert “This is addictive”.

Even worse, schools have spent the last decade reinforcing another lose-lose proposition for kids. Firstly, computers are essential for their future (we fear not providing more than proving this as a true). Secondly, kids can’t be let near a computer without supervision, because (like outdoors), unstructured, randomness of the environment and people means we can’t trust anyone online. The sad fact is that in all the demonising of ‘online spaces’ kids are highlighted as both the worst protagonists and the most likely victims.

Cyber safety and online bullying receives billions in annual funding to ensure this fallacy will continue. While schools gladly pay (and force kids to play) Maths games – for the creative, imaginative kid, Minecraft isn’t even considered. Minecraft is about survival and progression after all. No wonder kids hate educational games … they are not games, just more erosion of play.

So why is it parents love and loath games such as Minecraft?

The reality is, there’s no depth of research to point anyone in one direction or the other – but what is interesting is that Minecraft is often exemplified as a symbol of parents broader worries about the impact on digital media in all forms, and their lack of experience or publicly accessible information as to what to do. Despite being habitual users of technology, parents see games as negative – which is not at all amazing, as this is what exactly the message set forward in fear-attention media cycles.

Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that’s us.

The fact many parents can’t find the middle ground between what they want and what their kids want also predicated by two things – we live in  (and are contantly exposed to) a culture of fear. The media finds it useful, so do politicians to point of the monster under the bed and the slippery slope fallacy at every opportunity.

The Internet has become about outing ‘the thing’ that we fear the most, using the method that get’s most attention. In the cycle of ‘things’ that most people react to, video games are an easy target for a willing audience, who respond with predictable compliance.

I argue that teachers are more interested in finding similarity and avoiding people who aren’t like them, which I’d argue is a valid description of a ‘personal learning network’.

Secondly, the Internet (especially social media) magnifies and amplifies these fears. We are rightly fearful of the digital-attention-economy that our kids are being drawn into. Whether it’s your boss ‘embellishing’ their job title on Linked In and at the same time critical of people using social media or a teen publishing fifty selfies a day on Instagram – we’re not sure what it means … but we are sure that it get’s attention.

We’re fearful, yet buy into it, as we are emotional creatures who react fearfully to uncertainty. Towards Minecraft (or other game) – parents increasingly fear it’s influence and the kids reaction to losing access to it. But to isolate one game from the broad fear-attention culture being perpetuated sees more difficult to me. I am not saying that a screaming match about turning off the Xbox isn’t a real pain in the ass – it is, but I ask you this – what in the course of the child’s development, during school, are they doing to learn about this …

I argue almost nothing. Cybersafety (fear), teachers listening to social media edu-gurus (attention). What I fear (as a parent and educator) is the amount of attention these two things have consumed in the last five years (along with billions of dollars). In part, this has exasperated and expanded the dilemma facing classrooms – to be relevant, they need to by in sync with social-issues and trends, but to be effective, they need to function around the theories and methods of their founding fathers (and teacher-belief).

On things for certain, the amount of information isn’t going to decline anytime soon. The amount of fear and attention-seeking media being consumed is based on our emotional (and often irrational) response to attention economy.

If it wasn’t Minecraft, it would be Facebook, Instagram or instant messaging. In a world where it’s difficult to un-plug kids from culture – Minecraft or Xbox is far less harmful than being addicted to fear-attention economics – something young people are particularly attracted to.

There is the total-unplugged option, but that seems to be harder to do, especially when schools are now encouraging the use of massive online networked technologies.

I’m still leading to games as being more likely to be Angels than Folk Devils. We can subscribe to the ‘mean world’ culture that is being transmitted constantly in our online micro-worlds, or we can think of games as working towards the kind of goals that have produced art throughout the ages. Games lampoon ideas, question the norms, assumptions and alternatives. They are not interested in avoiding controversy or in getting a rational response. They simply want to be played – and like an art’s plays with the viewer, a good game is something which reveals itself.

• What the artist meant to portray,
• what the artist actually did portray and
• how we react, as individuals, to both the intended and actual messages.

If you want to gamify the classroom – just let kids make super-hero bracelets and wear them whenever they like. Let them organise the next step, an quit supervising the crap out of everything. Open the door, they might just wander outside and play.

 

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false, idiom

Inbound email … in what appeared to be a genuine offer. On logging it however, it quickly became obvious that this ‘network’ being constructed was yet another creepy tree-house, built upon the premise that a few ‘big names’ (read popular in social media) we’re adding some form on content to some form of serious publication. It’s just another marketing portal – and symbolizes where millions of dollars get wasted each year. On self-interested gurus who mostly drive Range Rover Sports to their perky-seminars. Urgh, shoot me now.

Immediately, it wanted access to my private information and up popped a giant photo of someone I know is fantastic at marketing $2500 a day seminars on how to use SEO for newbies and businesses, but not some I can locate in any relevant educational journals. Having dismissed that ‘link’, there was yet another forum, trying to get me to ‘post’ free information to it.

I find this – and other Branded sales-portals among the most un-ethical and idiosyncratic rubbish being pedaled as ‘education’ and ‘innovation right now. I have a badge, it reads “I’m visualising you on fire right now”, which I would gladly wear in favour of Apple, Google or Microsoft.

Please, if you must to do this – please be honest and I wouldn’t have to blog about being skimmed (again).

Escaping the filter

This image hit me like a brick in the face. Are we an effective team Jack?

Watch “Bill Oddie’s BankWatch” on YouTube

What the kid who slammed his teacher taught me.

Tags

games

At the risk of lumping ‘gamification’ into one basket, it seems to me that many are using the term interchangeably with serious games and educational games. The differences between them are arguable, although gamification has emerged from pop-media-culture. Gamification is the ‘tag-line’ of Gabe Zichermann and adopted by several other social-media active brands such as Jane McGonigal and Bryron Reeves.

While games in education are not new, in order for new brands to sell books, conference tickets and consultancy gigs, it clearly pays to invent a new idiom. In essence, motivating and engaging learners is a piece of cake with gamification.

Except it isn’t. In fact I believe that attempting to gamify-content is the wrong direction. That content could be subject fodder, it could be problems or work-place practices. Attempting to gamify the substance of the action is fraught with problems, a useful argument with which catch the attention of the common herd.

Rather than improve performance or stability of a learning design, games work best with they highlight the discrepancies between act and content, between performance and proposition – in the mind of the player.

We play games for many reasons. The content of the game is the landscape, the environment which is represented to the player in one form or another, but is interpreted in a multitude of ways. This leads to each player’s performance being unique. Although the idea might be, solve a set of problems and earn the points, it’s a false proposition to suggest the player has understood anything new, or anything that will be transferred to other situations.

What great games do, is provide the player with an internal image of themselves and their abilities when in this environment and provoked to act on the content. They act in legal and illegal moves. A game such a Minecraft teaches players what these are in the context of sub-goals that they player proposes. For example, I want to create a bridge with a lava-trap for un-welcome visitors. In Warcraft, the player wants better PvP gear, and so has to learn the moves needed for that sub-goal.

Games are not about leveling or progressing from A to B, they are about learning about much more complex reasoning. I seems crazy to gamify content as a response to the long held view that in order for people to solve problems, we need to generate problem content. This isn’t what schools do, or publishers. The problem is only to past the test and to do that you don’t need to solve problems, but remember which content to repeat and which to ignore. The legal and illegal moves in school are extremely primate in comparison to the problem content presented in Minecraft (what content?) or Second Life (what do I do?) or Call of Duty (what killed me?). Kids are learning how to opimise their performance by reducing the number of illegal moves it takes to solve the content-problem.

Why do kids Google? You might believe it is because they are lazy, or that the Internet is filled with great information for free. I think they do it because it reduces illegal moves – even if the problem is just that of getting though boring content and please their teacher.

Of course there are many types of problem content that have been used for years outside of games. Sadly school-designers didn’t believe this was needed. After all, what schools we’re to produce are workers, who will operate in a system. Giving them problem content would give them the ability to not just find ‘bullshit’, but to create it, and feed it back to any system no smart enough to filter it.

To me, any declaration that the way lessons are designed falls under ‘gamification’ would be sufficient for me to avoid it. For example, gamified lessons are almost always state specific and content specific. Students learn to identify correct information by the responses they receive. What makes gamers very good at problem solving is their experience at reasoning over several problem types.

In school age education, this isn’t required. Addicted to the Blooms step-ladder, the questions presented are predicable and isolated from reality. To pass the test, one must learn to pass the test, not test the problem. If we allowed kids to test the problem, we would accept lies as correct answers as being evidence of their understanding. When you see lies (or illegals) on an exam paper, they are marked in-correct and often put online examples of a student being a smart-arse or dummy. The over-arching need is however to determine which students pass and which fail.

I think that in looking at games, educators should be able to firstly demonstrate they know about information processes, and how to evidence them with technology. This isn’t points or badges (please keep up). These are the vital performance components we need to find any validity for using a games with present one form of problem content or another.

So, if you know what information processes happen in Warcraft, you can use it to teach anything you like, in any manner you like – provided you know how to MAP THESE ELEMENTS back to current situation. To know if you are teaching them, not just wasting their time on personal vanity excursions – then the student must be able to perform analogous experiments. That sounds dense – try this. Kids building over and over in Minecraft are teaching themselves in this way. They don’t need help, they just need valid problem content. This is what went into Massively Minecraft, and why I was, from day one, opposed to the idea of lessons. Lessons are not about reducing illegal moves, creating new sub-problems and experiments. Lessons have outcomes that can be ticked with a red-pen and uploaded to government statistical propaganda websites.

Is this a literacy? Perhaps. But the Blooms triangle is wrong and in-compatible (sorry Edlandians).

Games require ill-defined problem spaces. These can be made of anything. The nature of the problem has to be established before any content is needed. It must relate to past analogous experiments. From this, we can construct – not the game, but the player.

• Encoding
• Inference
• Mapping
• Application
• Comparison
• Justifications

They must be challenged to do this using combinations of operations as the combinations of problem content determine the ease or difficulty. This is essential for a student to perform each successive operation successfully and to remove those which are not needed.

In effect, you can play Warcraft and learn how to pass an exam when the information processes are well structured – but not declared to the player at all. They will learn to be ‘good at’ because they are learning what information processes reduce illegal moves.

What we don’t know is how information is represented in human memory. Why is it a kid with elite gaming skills and creativity finds it hard to complete classroom tasks

For the most part, school rarely requires students to act, merely to remember the packets. I was interested this week by the kid who slammed his teacher. I think, he said “Packets” and to me that’s an important phrase. He’s talking about teaching as an information process (how would he know much educational theory). He’s a player and the packets are not reducing the moves he needs to succeed. This doesn’t relate to gamification as much as memory organisation packets or “MOPs”. Something popular in research during the 70s that I won’t delve into here.

So my suspicion is that learning about gamification is a red-herring, but it keeps some popular-media names in business. What matters is how well we learn to construct information packets for a generation playing games. This should have a lasting impact on the memory as well as being entertaining and building efficacy in the player.

I wish my kids could learn a language at the same light speed they learned Warcraft. Packets in games are use information process that target normative methods (this is how I did it), associated states (I could try this) and associated actions (I could do it like this). All the time, a game deals with elements in a present situation. Despite being a fantasy environment, games present situations in ways school processes don’t. The student is not actively present in the problem – and therefore often not in a receptive state of mind.

There are of course massive problems and gaps in this post (which is just me thinking out loud). No least age, individual differences and so on. What does seem essential to me is that students benefit from being given specific lessons on problem-solving skills (especially girls). This has, over generations shown that students, when given future problem content have greater insight.

There isn’t a video game out there that doesn’t do this, but there are classrooms everywhere which ignore it – or worse, assume it’s only the gifted or smart kids that can handle it. I guess the big deal here is that you don’t need any technology to do implement this at all.

Twitter and Facebook are not where kids are heading. Meet Kik and Oink.

Tags

kik, parents, snap chat, teachers

There is a myth, perpetuated for little more reason than it’s sellable-fallacy, that kids are gravitating to Twitter and Facebook. From this point, numerous arguments have been made in the sub-culture Alan Lavine brilliantly described as “Edlandia” – a sharp and humurous hat-tip to Portlandia the TV show (relates to MOOCS).

There is pervasive notion that the issues today are the same as those even three years ago. They might continue to sell this obsolete rhetoric to Edlandians, but kids are using very different networks – and here’s why.

Kids are being given hand-held devices. iPod touch, low end Androids and so on. They are no using desktops, laptops or TABLETs. If Edlandians paid attention to advertising data and sales data as much as they do their Twitter feed-bowls they’d know this.

Kids are heading to Instagram and Kik because they are essentially the two messaging services that appeal.

Instagram being the ‘selfie’ universe that screams “I am am here” and Kik the natural successor to MSN Messenger, saying “I belong”.

On signing up for Kik, it will go off and find your friends from other places. No age verification process – choose a name and you’re in. It doesn’t bother to mention it’s geo-locational by default either. Kid’s like it, because Kik automatically builds your close network (the one that matters most) for zero effort. If you missed the Blackberry Messenger phenomenon (we didn’t get that in Australia) – then Kik is the same idea, just on a way bigger scale.

Kids are interested in friend based networks. They don’t waste time talking about PLNs ore trying to self-justify why they send hours a day gazing into a piece of glass like the Edlandians. Kids are mildly interested in the famous and idioms constantly pushed to them by the media if they are bored. Kik ensures every person is a media outlet and a brand at a younger age. It’s massive with tweens, and probably all new to you right?

Intragram says “I am here” and Kik’s multi-participant ‘group’ conversations say “I belong” – or more worryingly, I’m an outcast. The potential for cyber-bullying is mind-melting.

Why is Kik not like Twitter?

Firstly, Kik won’t appeal to those who’ve build a business using Twitter to sell themselves as a brand. Like video-games, you probably won’t hear about it at ISTE this year at all. It holds no value, apart from being represented as an example of ‘bad internet’. It’s ‘bad’ because it won’t work as a direct selling layer. It would be great for messaging colleagues. Kik provides ‘small networking’ where they are selling ‘massive networking’. If you didn’t know better, you’d believe MASSIVE is mandatory in all things right now.

Twitter is, (as forums are) – a shopping mall of entertainment and opinion, where no one really knows who you are – nor do they actually care. Twitter for Edlandians is free feeding bowl of chaotic ideas, resources and events. In between these tweets are the irrelevant ‘self-advertising’ of consultants still feeding off false idioms, first aired in 2007.

Is Kik like Google Plus?

I’ll set Google Plus aside here, as it seems to be a growing source of productive groups. G+ doesn’t work for the Twitter salesman, not those who want a free feed. G+ appears to me to foster more productive communities of practice (which are nothing new) – See – The Well. Google Plus however is populated by the grown-ups.

Is Kik like Facebook?

Facebook is of course the archetypal villan in media-representation of cyber-bullying and the ‘slippery slope’ of failing young people. Like MSN Messenger, My Space and Bedo, Facebook has a connected identity with a generation that will fade in it’s appeal to the next.

Kik will be the network your tweens will want – and probably already have. They know you know about Facebook and Twitter – Kik is like texting (or so it appears to a-typical adults). But it’s not. It’s a very private, geo-located fishbowl that is growing fast.

Kik lets them see if their friends have seen their message. There’s no age verification, seemingly no teen safeguards on the connected app OinkText. If you are a parent, I doubt you’ll like Oink Text. This add on nag-app, pushes ‘randoms’ looking to chat. They call it a friend finder. Hello Yahoo Chatrooms, circa 1998 – A/S/L. Who remembers them? Not the Edulandians thats for sure. Savvy tweens will avoid Oink Text (and others) but the lonely, the disaffected and the vulnerable I could well imagine meeting some very dubious characters through it.

Is Kik like Linked In

Ah Linked In. This is where people make profiles when they have no reputation, relevance or ability to use social media. Its laughable how people use it give themselves grandious titles to fool the world into thinking they are something they are not. Here’s a wake up, if you are only on Linked In, you don’t blog, you don’t tweet and you don’t do something outside that phoney profile, it’s a 200 foot billboard saying “I am a n00b, who’s faking it”. So no, Kik is not like linked it, it’s not a desperate business card or forum.

If I’m a teacher should I be worried?

Yes. Kik is one of a number of tools like this, all of which give kids the friend-networks they crave – and lock you out of. Talking about using Twitter to the Kik-Gen will make you appear a dinosaur. Kik has no educational or pedagogical value whatsoever.

If I’m a parent should I be worried?

Yes, most schools have no clue what Kik (and others) are, how they function or where. They are focused on the fallacies being fed to them by the media and Edlandian consultants. You need to know what Kik is, because you’re kids probably do already. It’s not like Facebook, it’s more like hyper-SMS messaging. What I’m saying is, even the Edlandians who think they are on the cutting edge of educational technology are sadly illiterate.

What else is there to worry about?

How about Snap Chat? Essentially, photo-sharing app, Snapchat lets you determine how long the recipient can view your picture or video, from 1 to 10 seconds. After that, it self-destructs. Young people love it for sending goofy selfies to one another for a laugh. You can imagine what they can do with this when it comes to bullying.

Why do kids use Kik, Instagram and Snap Chat?

Kids don’t use Instagram, Kik or Snap Chat just to communicate. They use it for three more important things, which parents need to wrap their heads around.

1. Identity (who am I, maybe I’m this, what happens if I say that, is this version of me good?) It’s a messy business in real life, now amplified in the digital.
2. My Community (do I fit it, am I normal, who is like me, who can help me, can I help them) The digital world is full of illusions that we identify with – it share a lot with how we find comfort and shared experience in music and video games too.
3. Finding solace and comfort (It’s good to know someone cares, that there is someone to reach out to, someone to listen when seemingly no one else does. Its dangerous thing to seek online, but in lieu of finding it in RL, it’s just a tap away).

Why do they like video-games like Minecraft? Because it feeds them the 3 things they “think” they want most from technology (and life).

The point of this post is in to highlight my growing frustration with the commercialisation which has corrupted Edlandia. While I’ve been advocting for games in the classroom (not very successfully), it seems I might as well point some other things the rhetoric ignores.

The current generation of 7 year olds don’t need teaching about Twitter, Blogs or Wikis. They simply need you to be aware of, and understand what they do use – which will have an impact on how they see themselves, others, the world – and YOU.

This of course plays havoc with the current commercial market of Edlandia which would have you believe something entirely different is happening. I’m Type217 on Kik, see ya on the Tween-side soon.

Watch “Space Oddity” on YouTube

Normal is incompatible. Please re-install diversity.

There have been many opinions about which technologies would radically change the classroom in the last decade. These were ignited by the advent of blogging and in that, the potential new markets and audiences to buy information.

The truth of the matter is, if you want to find success outside the norm, you really have to fine-tune your skills and become incredibly good at what you do. If you’re going to get in the ring, babe, you better know how to box. — Kelly Cutrone (Normal Gets You Nowhere)

I think, after several years of particpating in edu-media – educational technology experts have become mostly experts in talking about educational technology. They have crafted and perfected a pursasion build the lie that technological determinism is normal and will get you everywhere. Normal here is predicated by supply and demand economics which they find profitable. I don’t want that kind of normal thanks.

Most kids turn into adults who share cultural physical space with others. Their glass personalities, carried by invisible data-channels are secondary to the natural world.

We are not the same you and I, and many of us struggle with wondering – if I am going to conform to a type – what type is that? It seems to me, on reflection that I’m not the type to press “I accept” without first wondering what it is. Other people take no interest in glass at all, and they too are normal.

Perhaps we are the first generation to click-away our rights before bothering to read the contract. This seems ironic, given the civil rights movements efforts in previous generations to give us the right to be able to read a contract. We click “yes” before we read it, let alone understand it. The result is a world where corporations mine data and sell it to the highest bidder.

I agree to nothing, especially not the unproven rhetoric which has dominated the stages and conference halls of educational technology. Few seem to ponder the civil rights issues at all. Why would they? actually admitting technology is a loaded weapon pointed at the crowd of innocents is hardly in line with the fallacy of the ‘slippery slope’ of falling educational standards – which has benefitted those who perfected it.

To prove that technology in the classroom is normal we have to stop being normal. That seems to conflict with millions of years of evolution … but in line with the current crop of future-dystopia science fiction such as Elysium

I don’t want my kids or my friends to be normal. I want them to be exceptional – and right now there seems little exceptional emitting from the once influential “Twitter”, just people skimming or aggregating. No one’s creating … everyones re-skinning Skinner.

And from this, we are to expect our children will emerge enthusiastic, ready to take on a future, bounded by filter-bubbles and a lack of privacy.

Tommorow

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We are reaching the end of the second generation of knowledge management, with its focus on tacit-explicit knowledge conversion. Triggered by simplified software to allow anyone to write themselves into digital culture, not just programmers, whom are unfairly labelled as the architects of ‘read only web’. This focus on ‘user generated has substantially failed to deliver on its promised benefits – remarkable more for self than self-improvement, programmers have set to work creating ever more ways to hurl mob-culture further.

The lines are now well and truly blurred between context, narrative, content and challenges. Some people have been more successful at digital adaptation by creating complex overlays for their lives, but I seriously wonder whether this has created any greater democracy or equality. I don’t see it as maintainable, let alone sustainable.Those with the power see to find ever more ways to digitally flaunt it over those who remain at their mercy. Being Twitter famous adds no new armour to the fragility of modern life away from it.

What would be nice, would to sit here assured that second generation knowledge had brought with it a second generation behaviour which made everyone feel better. We’d all have a greater sense of agency over the natural and un-natural world. But here we are (or I am, ten years later) wondering what tomorrow might bring in the email, or the stars. One or other is set to triumph.

Moving chairs.

Is the dark side of social media being honestly represented by educational-advocates? Several years have passed since I eagerly signed up for Twitter and Facebook. I think, for my sins, I’m in the first 5% who did. Before that, social was about writing and exchanging ideas via blog platforms. Social media, mostly Twitter – was a short-cut to what everyone wanted – more conversations, more endorsement and more agency.

But times have changed significantly. The world Tumblr is more searched for than the word ‘blog’. Most of those people whom I learned the most from (and had the most fun with) use Twitter for social-connectedness and entertainment. The dark-side is that social media (for educators) didn’t turn out to be the kind of ‘succeed’ culture expected, but a feed culture, where people either churn out the same old gruel or stare into their smart phone expecting for the unexpected to be fed to them.

Google Communities are not useful for those who built their educational-consultancy businesses off the back of Twitter and rhetorical fallacies. More and more, I see people whom have contributed most (not for profit) establishing string G+ communities and others. I drop back into social media to be social, not connected.

Twitter is not the most effective channel for connecting educators. It’s was the most effective channels for establishing a certain belief, at a certain time. Just as MySpace was once good for bands … there are now far better places – actual radio stations such as TripleJ Unearthed, where anyone can participate.

The dark side is appearing more and more. The media is finding it hard to point at games as violence and addiction epicentres - now that Reddit sleuths didn’t find the Boston bomber, but did managed to add a new victim.

The dark side for educators is that, up until now – rhetoric (in 140 characters or less) was sufficient to build a business. It was a great way to build an affiliate network and to establish that ‘disruptive’ was the source of school improvement. Now the money’s gone, the people are going and the messages are as out of place as 486×60 banner ad.

Where are you going more and more?