href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/71419691@N00/2994464414/”>★ spunkinator via Compfight cc

A few years ago I got into a kerfuffle with the owner of a website about bicycles and cycling. I like bikes, and I like reading about bikes, and I sometimes like the way this guy writes about bikes. But on this day, I really took issue with the way he phrased the mission of the site: “to curate content about cycling.”

Curate? Really? It seems a little self-important. Suddenly, Joe Schmo has gone from being a sometimes-interesting writer about bikes, to a curator. I told him the unearned job promotion put me off, as it implied an expertise he didn’t have: let’s be honest, he’s a bike guy, not a research librarian with years of study in the stacks. Save the curation for PhD art historians.

As you’d expect, it ended with both of us in a snit, and I haven’t returned to see the gems he’s “curated” over the years.

Now, I do appreciate the value in appropriating “curation” in the popular sense, the way the folks at curator’s code would. It’s a nice way of understanding what we do as we read and write in the read/write web, and attributing our finds to those who found before us. If we see far, after all, it’s because we stand on the shoulders of giants. See, I’m curating even now, pulling links together for this paragraph.

My reactionary reaction, though, comes from a place of concern with the way much activity on the web has been redefined: writers and artists are no longer, you know, writers and artists. Now, they are “content creators” panning for facebook hits. Journalism is dead or dying, as crowdsourced or outsourced creators package neat little stories at $8.00 a pop, writing for content farms. Hyperlocal news takes over for professional journalism, at the cost of in-depth (and expensive) investigative reporting. (Note: none of these complaints are new. I’ve curated some links for you here, but make no mistake: I’m just echoing others’ concerns.)

So: curating? Sure. In the weak sense, we’re all curators. I’m curating all the time as I surf, write, link, clip, note, and bookmark. But I think we do harm to the professional sense of “curation” and we oversell our own activity. Let’s not stop linking, clipping, etc., and let’s be grateful for the new power we have. But we must also remember that this brave new world that has such people in’t comes at a cost.

It’s hard to say anything new about bullying–online, offline, in school or out. Our readings for the week, especially Dana Boyd’s story of Janiya and Precious, remind us that at its heart bullying (or “drama,” or “situations”) is a matter of empathy; kids develop intellectually and emotionally at different rates, and it just takes time and care to help them find their way. “Lectures by uncool old people like me aren’t going to make teens who are engaged in dramas think twice about what they’re doing,” Boyd says, and I think most teachers have had that experience.

We’ve been doing technology advisory lessons in the 9th grade at ECA, to complement the work kids are doing in their Wellness class, focusing on the COETAILy issues of online presence and citizenship. My colleagues on the 9th grade team and I felt pretty good that we were making an impact, that kids were hearing us (despite our being chronically uncool). Then another drama surfaced, with a student using technology–screenshots of WhatsApp conversations–to drive a wedge between two other kids who have been friends for years. Well, crap. At a small school like ours, the situation/drama/bullying quickly grows beyond three students to fill the 9th grade collective consciousness.

The technology certainly made it easier for the young man to do harm, for the harm to spread, for the ripples to extend. But it’s the same behavior we’ve seen in 9th graders since, well… since I was in 9th grade, at least. So we’re trying to find solutions that build on what we know about young people and what they know of themselves, and we’re putting tech aside for a while. Empathy, not technology, as Boyd says. My colleagues and I are trying to find empathy for the bully, and we’d very much like him to develop some for his victims. Tech can wait.

Last year, my colleagues at Escuela Campo Alegre convened a committee to re-think our “internet safety” lessons in the middle and high schools. The MS tech specialist and I weren’t super happy about even the name of this approach: internet safety is important, sure, and it’s complex, but it connotes a dangerous place where bogeymen are out to get us. (Sure, there are such bogeymen, but as David Pogue writes, such concerns can easily be overblown.) Instead, my friend and I wanted to talk about “Positive Online Presence,” the idea of the footprint we explored in COETAIL last week.

As the committee worked on lessons, we talked with kids about privacy, publicity, and making good use of the internet, not just locking it down. A critical cultural divide surfaced pretty quickly, highlighting the different ways the old (that’s us!) and the young think about privacy: we would say “Be careful: are you aware of how public your status updates are?,” and the kids would answer with, “Of course we’re aware! That’s the whole point!”

In other words, we old folks see privacy as the goal, even as we’re using social networks designed for sharing. And our students understand those networks, I believe, more deeply: they see that the DNA of facebook (and other services) is publicity. To keep erecting walls and groups and limited sharing options is, a radical misunderstanding of the social element of social networking. You could make a fish ride a bicycle, but why?

So, given that kids understand the social DNA, our mission has to be something positive, oriented around helping them build positively. Lessons that focus on the negative (and well documented, and real) effects of privacy problems won’t work.

These days, I hear concerns about privacy and safety with a sense that I’m listening to dinosaurs complaining about the changing weather. No question, they’re real concerns, but there’s a shift happening, we can’t stop it, and our old ideas about those issues are quickly becoming irrelevant.

Note: Full document also available here.

Background and Rationale:

This is an initial proposal for HS students at Escuela Campo Alegre to maintain four-year online portfolios of their learning.

I’ve been inspired by conversations the tech teachers have had here, and small programs we’ve developed, around the idea of students’ building a positive online presence. We would like our students to have something to show to college admissions committees, of course, but we also want them to use online tools to create a space where they can practice good digital citizenship, connecting positively with others, and creating a positive (and true!) online persona.

Beyond just a scrapbook of their best work, a digital portfolio can be a place for students to demonstrate learning process and growth, to connect to other learners, and to make ties across disciplines.

Timing:
I propose to phase in the portfolios, starting with grades 9 and 10 in the first year, and then adding a new group for the next two years. IB diploma students already have a lot on their plate, but portfolios are part of the program in Art and several other disciplines, and reflection is a piece of all their work, including the sciences. It would not take much extra work to ask students to curate selections and add them to a personal portfolio.

Management and Skill-Teaching:
The HS at ECA has a tech teacher with a free period for integration. The tech teacher sees every 9th grade student in their first year, and can build initial portfolios with each student that year. The basic technical skills are within reach of every student. Our school uses Google Apps for Education, so all students would have access to an ecak12.com blog. (I suggest using Blogger as a platform, rather than Sites. The blogger format allows for easy tagging and category-creation, and it shows time well, a key element of a growth portfolio.)

In the first year, in each discipline, students would be responsible for adding one entry per semester, per class. Each entry would have one artifact-plus-reflection.

Possible entries by discipline:

• Literature: Creative writing; literary analysis; sound files from oral commentary
• Social Studies: Powerpoint presentations; movies; written analysis
• Science: Lab data and conclusions; photos and movies of procedures;
• Art: photos of paintings and sculptures
• Theater: scripts; set designs; timing sheets for theater tech
• Music: recordings of performances

In the first year, we would ask students to comment on others’ portfolios at their grade level. In subsequent years, we would extend to other schools, with the help of our network of international teachers. (A natural connection might be with the schools in our athletic networks, CAISSA and VANAS.)

Concerns:
Safety: Venezuela is not a safe country. Students need to take care with personal identifying information. Kids should not be googleable through their portfolios. This is tricky, as we want students to practice good digital citizenship, but they also must be safe.

Workload: Faculty might be concerned that portfolios will add significantly to their workload. In the first year, at least, we should limit the number of expected entries, and explain to faculty that students should post work that they are already doing in class. Also, because the goal of a growth-oriented portfolio is to show development of time, students do not need to post only polished, high-level artifacts.

We would need to reserve time during staff PD for working with teachers to develop guidelines for what to post, and how to build reflections. But ideally, portfolio entries would be student-driven, so that students choose what to include. Entries would be tied to the work in class–there is no additional work for classroom teachers, except for assuring that each student posts one entry per semester. (We would also have to work as a staff to develop appropriate assessment guidelines: how do we hold students accountable for their posting?)

Assessment: We need to develop an accountability and assessment system for portfolios. The simplest version is to ask teachers in each discipline to add one post per semester to their gradebook, but a more authentic approach would be to ask students to lead semester conferences by describing their portfolio work. There are a number of rubrics available for assessing portfolios, online and off-. This is a bigger task, but students in our MS already do this. It might take time to get the HS up to speed. (Student-led conferences is another big initiative! It might not be easy or advisable to develop portfolios and conferences at the same time.)

Next Steps:
If the HS decides to use online portfolios in some form, we would need to create policies and clear expectations for students and for teachers. Fortunately, many other schools use online portfolios, and we could build on their experience. We should also have exemplar portfolios–perhaps by teachers modeling their own learning?–available for students.