It’s the media…the social media, that is.

UPDATE: It seems fitting that this is the post I wrote yesterday, the day before the passing of Steve Jobs. While I avoided the terms iPhone, iPod and iPad, Job’s visionary genius and Apple’s leadership in terms of technology are the foundation and infrastructure upon which these social media tools depend, and are the hardware students are using and will be using for years to come to access the universe we all inhabit. While the company will continue, and his spirit of creativity is no doubt imbued into the philosophy and plans for the future, his creative vision will be missed. Thank you, Steve.

“Social Media” conjures up a variety of thoughts and images: kids hunched over their smartphones in groups, not speaking to each other but laughing about the text they are sharing; teenagers or college students snapping pictures of each other, posed and unposed, and uploading them to Facebook for consumption by that website’s “more than 800 million active users”; people wasting time in front of screens, mobile and desktop, instead of talking to each other or appreciating nature and athletics. All of these pictures portray a negative, narcissistic environment doomed to collapse under the weight of it’s own self-indulgence. But what if they’re wrong?

Mobile computing, social media, smartphones and iPads are toys that adults are turning into tools (or tools masquerading as toys) that have the power to transform education as we know it. Latinos are already the largest ethnic group of users on Twitter and Facebook. Rather than fear this fact, muttering to ourselves in Spanglish about how children are spending too much time playing on their phones, we need to encourage them to put those tools to work, creating a revolution inside the classroom, inside the schools in this country, inside our minds to empower our children.

The power of social media played out earlier this week when thousands of people, Latinos and others, logged in to Ustream to participate in a town hall on the state of education in the Hispanic community with US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. What was notable was the immediate access and interaction granted the citizens of the United States via Twitter, allowing real time interaction with the man responsible for shepherding education policy in the United States. We got to ask questions, from the philosophical to the financial, and get some answers. It will play out again when people from across the country gather in Chicago next month for the LATISM National Conference. Imagine if we shared that power to learn and interact with our students.

Teachers are already finding that student success is increasing using technology and social media across the country. It simply takes a shift in thinking to understand that what our kids are using for fun can be used to teach them both the content and skills, that the same apps and sites they’re using to KIT (keep in touch) can be used to create songs, films, podcasts that speak to who they are and share their gifts and talents with a larger world.

In doing this, using new technology and social media to interact with their own education, they will learn that the power to transform the world rests in their hands; the tools they need to impact their school, their neighborhood, their city, their state, their country can be used inside the classroom as well as with their homies.

And there is definitely an app for that.

Originally posted 10/03/11 at Latinos In Social Media for Edu-Wednesday.

Related articles

• Time to Vote for LATISM’s BEST of 2011 (juliorvarela.com)
• Word Cloud: How Social Media Remembered Steve Jobs (socialtimes.com)
• Social media is for telling your Story.. not for distributing your CV !! (mysocialadventures.wordpress.com)

Clay Tablets and iPads

“if the purpose of education is not what education does for a student, but does to a student, then the goal of education is not simply information, but formation…” – Les Frost, 1999

Necesitamos cambiar como tratamos la educación, y las herramientas que usamos para educar a nuestros hijos.  Technology isn’t a toy.

It is so much more.

We need to understand, both in the larger American community and amongst Latinos, that tablet computing and social media are the next evolution in education, and we need to push our schools and our students to embrace them and prepare for the future that is here.

Technology, by definition, means “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.” The advancement from clay tablets to paper, that was technology. It was a change in the manner of learning, of maintaining the historical record, of passing information, and it shaped the way people interacted. The shift from copying texts by hand to the printing press, that was technology. It changed European society, making literacy a much more common occurrence, because the price of books dropped with mass production, and with books more common, incentive to read and gain knowledge for oneself greater.  It also meant that the elite (read: wealthy) members of society no longer held exclusive sway over religious or political knowledge, because The Holy Bible or books like Machiavelli’s The Prince were readily available.  The pipeline of information was widened so that more people could access it.

Today we have fully entered the digital age.  As a nation, and a human society, we have moved from print to cyberspace.  Pero esta vez, tenemos la oportunidad de hacer este tipo de tecnología accesible a todos, no solo a aquellos con los recursos necesarios.  This technological shift, from iPads (and iPods and Galaxy Tabs) is a sociological and educational earthquake, which will break down the walls of privilege and demolish the foundations of inequality if we change how we conceive tools.

Are iPads cool?  Yes!  Are they expensive? ¡Por supuesto! Are they worth the investment in our children? ¡Solamente si queremos brindarles la oportunidad de ser exitosos! We need to understand that iPads are the next invention to change the world: paper, printing press, iPads.

Technology, in this case the tablet computer, is simply the tool we use to succeed.  The problem with Apple and the iPad is that we continue to see it as a toy, a shiny bauble that wealthy people play with and unwealthy people envy.  We see social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr) as time-wasting nothingness. And there are pieces of that which are true. But they can be so much more.

Facebook can be a means of connecting with students, with teachers, with parents, and school communities, sharing events and information in a central location.  Twitter in the classroom can be the voice of quieter students who are unable or unwilling to shout to be heard. YouTube allows sharing of projects and assessments with parents, grandparents, padrinos, tíos and others, validating student effort and achievements, and allowing students to share what they’ve learned. Flickr is another central location focused on the sharing of photos of class trips, student projects, etc.  All of these are accessible, along with textbooks, notes, recorded lectures, novels, video clips and student essays on the iPad our children should be carrying when they walk into school in September.

We wouldn’t deny our children paper and pens and expect them to succeed in school.

Our children need tablets, computers, iPads. The world is already moving past books and paper. As adults, we use sites like Latinos in Social Media and Latino Rebels to connect with, to encourage, to learn from, to support and to engage with gente who are working with similar goals, with similar aspirations, who have knowledge and skills and desires that complement ours.  Why do we expect our children to be different?

I make this argument not as an expert in education, though I’ve been teaching in public and private schools for sixteen years (and in schools for thirty-four); nor as a science-fiction fan who sees in the tablet the desks on which Ender Wiggin played the fantasy game.

I make this argument as a parent of two middle school-bound students, looking toward their educational future with excitement and their future careers and employment with uncertainty.  The iPad, the tablet computer, the window on the world and the universe that you can hold in your hands, is the vehicle our children will ride into the future.

First posted 6 July 2011 at Latinos in Social Media for Edu-Wednesday.

Related articles

• Computer Tablets and eReader Devices in the Classroom (crenk.com)
• Schools Embrace the iPad – Embracing the Extended Classroom (timesoftexas.com)