It was good as long as it lasted

WARNING: This will be a sour grapes rant!

July will start in a few days. And with that, I will finally have to make up my mind what to do with my couple of Ning networks. The latest email from the Ning Team tells me the following:

I had been led to believe earlier that the Mini deal would be free for all schools, but it now turns out that since I'm outside North America, I will have to start paying, even for Ning Mini. Actually, even free Ning Mini wouldn't have helped me with my international projects, which I have been running for the last three years, as the membership has exceeded the 150 allowance of Ning Mini. However, I was hoping to still be able to run smaller projects free, even after the Ning changes took place.

I know, I should have seen this coming. There is no free lunch. Even so, I feel I've been given a rotten deal here. My school won't pay to keep the old Nings running, nor to start any new ones. I was told to go back to the platform my school offers - Moodle. There was a reason why I abandoned Moodle three years ago, though. Ning was so much more user-friendly, and appealing to young people. I know, even more reason why we should pay for using such a slick service! But I don't think it will now be an option for many in the public school systems outside the US. In principle, I am not willing to start paying for the school Nings out of my own pocket. Many people say that it's not the tools, it's what you do with them. Quite right, but after driving a sportscar with all the modern bells and whistles, it won't be so much fun being behind the wheel of a basic saloon again. School will once again be further removed from what the real world has to offer.

Another unfortunate consequence is losing the 'digital footprint' created in the earlier projects. Naturally, I have got some screenshots and statistics, plus presentations I have made about the projects, but most of the student work will just disappear into thin air. True, the quality of all of some of the student work leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm sure the Internet is already bursting with too much 'virtual waste'. But as a teacher, being able to refer to what has been done before, might be worthwhile in the future. International school project work is a continuous process, and documentation of it an essential part of moving ahead. Not to mention the transparency factor of anybody being able to see and assess the work online. What's more, I feel responsible for all the partner schools around the world, all the hard-working teachers and students, who have invested their faith and trust in this project, and who will now see all their efforts wasted. Many of them will lose the links they have created to the project site from their school webpage.

Looking at this map, I'm now wondering if it might be different if some of our partners were in North America? There is already talk about Finns creating their own social network services, in order to keep all the copyright and other issues strictly inside our own borders. How does that support the idea of bringing the world closer together, and more globalized education?

I am not looking forward to starting to decide how much, what and in what format to save some of the work of last year's project. I could think of better things to do during my summer holiday.

Ning and school - once again

After closing a very promising experiment with an online project Ning and  having started a new similar one, it's a good time to touch base and do a bit of reflection. All last year, my aim was to provide a lively, but to a certain degree secured (e.g. monitored membership), learning community to students in many countries. Looking back now, that's what we managed to build in a year although it wasn't by any means perfect. One of the problems was that initially, most of the students only joined because their teachers told them to, and consequently, the bulk of their community presence was in the form of teacher-led assignments. Very typically, students just went through the motions of uploading their blog posts or taking part in discussions to get their course credits from their teacher, but as soon as the assignments ended, the rest of the community members never heard about them again. On a more positive note, at the very least, they got a little bit of information about a new way of sharing information - with pictures and hyperlinks as opposed to the old static and linear pen to paper approach. Also, one of the main goals last year, apart from the obvious intercultural communication and authentic language use, was to introduce students to the idea of writing more serious blog posts in addition to the conversational chatting they are more familiar with. What I'm not so sure about now is whether this brief introduction will serve them for anything in the future, when they are more mature, and possibly have more to share and contribute.

Some time ago, I came across Dean Groom's blog post Communities just don't happen. Reading the next quote made me question the success of our learning community.

A strong community is desirable over a collection of people using a portal, because members are less likely to want to break the bonds made between them. Portals have users, who have no bonds.

Did we get anywhere beyond sharing a well-functioning portal for a loosely connected group? To my surprise, Google analytics revealed that last year's Ning still has almost as much activity as this year's one, even after officially stopping to manage it and guiding students to join the new one for this year. Clearly, some students managed to make lasting friendships and wanted to continue the dialogue even after the project as such was closed. What is quite evident, though, is that without teacher guidance and given assignments, the students simply use the old Ning as a place to leave short chatty messages on each other's walls, and possibly still carry on some of the discussions in the forum. No photos are added, or blog posts written any more.

I can't help wondering whether it would have been a better idea to keep the old Ning running and just accept new members to it. The reason why we opted for starting a totally new Ning for the second year, was that otherwise we would have ended up having too many dormant members after students graduated and left school, or their teachers decided not to continue with the project. With Ning, members have to delete their accounts themselves, the network creator can't do it. In addition, I was afraid that the this year's new members would find it difficult to navigate on the site, if all last year's posts, photos, videos etc. were already there. To avoid this, more guidance into following RSS feeds, for example, would be needed, to keep students on track of the latest additions on the site. Not a bad idea anyway! I think it's the old control-syndrome of many teachers that makes me want to keep organizing the Ning instead of just letting it shape a life of its own. On second thoughts now, I can see that there should be some sustainability to the whole concept of our Ning. We had better rethink the big picture of creating ongoing dialogue between students across continents and focus on the process and creating a sustainable community rather than a one-year project with a one-off end product.

The underlying problem is the 'old school' setting of such a project. In particular, if project work is made part of the curriculum, where students get credit for it, it easily turns into just another assignment for assignment's sake. To some extent, you can 'force' these assignments on students, but I totally agree with Dean Groom that "Participation in groups at the higher levels is entirely voluntary" - you cannot force commitment. As the structure of traditional school systems rather works against this, I have some budding ideas to develop next year, but more about them later.

Learning Ning by doing

Just last week I was complaining about the Ning platform lacking the facility for network creators to organise other people's discussions in the forum into categories to keep it all more structured and easily manageable.

Well, today I was proved wrong, as I found out the way I can actually do this. Thank you clever Ning team! This is probably not the only feature I have missed, and makes me like Ning even more now. I really feel good about accomplishing this all on my own. I wish my students experienced revelations and triumphs like this more at school, or with their studies in general. Undoubtedly, many of them do. Once I got the hang of what I can do to organise the discussion forum, it was a true 'flow exprerience' to get it done (so much so that it almost made me burn our family Easter dinner, as I couldn't interrup what I was doing online!).

Basically, as the network creator, you go to Manage the Discussion forum. What I hadn't noticed before, is the Add a catecory link there.



You can add as many as you like, and it's so fast and easy. So within minutes I had all the categories I wanted added.

Next I went through all the existing discussions and noticed that after the category name there is the option to change it, too.


Once you click 'Change' you get a drop-down menu of all the categories you have added to your Ning.


And then it's just a piece of cake to reorganise all the existing discussions into their new categories. Voilà! Here it is, the result of flow experience, a neat and structured discussion forum now with 12 working categories (as described in my previous blog post).



All I need to do now is to introduce and explain this new categorising system to all the members, so they will learn to make use of it, too, when they next add a discussion on the forum.

Now, was all this worth a blog post? Probably not. (In fact, if anyone ever reads my blog, they will probably find me a simple and useless dabbler with online tools!) Then again, as I am more and more using my blog as a place to make my learning visible and reflect on my own learning experiences, it is meaningful for me. And possibly for somebody else, too, who learns like me, in leaps and bounds and in a rather haphasard, non-linear and organised way. Somebody with different learning strategies would probably have studied all the features on Ning well before creating their own network, to know exactly what Ning offers and how it can be used. In hindsight, I did go back to Ning help, and naturally found all this information clearly written and demonstrated there!




Unfortunately, I am the type of person who doesn't want to read any boring manuals when starting to use new gadgets, for example. I will just go ahead and try to learn through trial and error - getting hopelessly frustrated with the errors, but feeling a great sense of accomplishment if I finally get it. This learning experience of mine is a good reminder for me about the many different learning styles of my students, and how 'one-size-fits-all' strategies and 'haven't I told you this so many times before' don't really reach all of them.

Another thought springing from this is why I didn't throw my question to the Ning team or teacher colleagues in the few social networks I belong to. I'm sure I would have got the answer in no time. Well, firstly I was under the misperception that reorganising already existing discussions on Ning is not possible. Secondly, even if I suspected it might be possible, I am in two minds about keep asking 'strangers' for help online. Although I have had many marvellous experiences of the altruism and helpfulness of people in social networks, I somehow feel that I am a nuisance always asking for help and tips, using others in a way, and not really being capable of reciprocating in any way. I guess it's early days for me with social networking, and I have not yet established any proper PLN for myself, which makes these feelings quite natural.

Despite the focus on collective intelligence and learning through connections these days, learning by doing on your own at times does feel great and empowering, too!

Guiding my global classroom

What an exhilarating experience it has been this year to coordinate our AEC-NET project on the Ning platform. Managing a community of over 200 members in 10 different countries over several months has been quite a challenge at times, but all in all, despite the expected technical and other hitches, Ning has worked very well, and mostly looked after itself. It has allowed for the freedom and ownership of the platform I envisioned for students right from the beginning. In previous projects we used to have a much more closely defined topic and specific final products in mind. I am sure most teachers still see project work in that way, ie. a project is not complete or worthwhile if it doesn't result in a concrete product at the end, which can then be showcased and assessed, as need be. I tend to be moving away from this focusing more and more on the process rather than an end result. As I have blogged before, how else can you really assess any actual students' learning, particularly when the end products, although based on student work, very often are produced by teachers, and not the students themselves?

I must say I have got quite attached to my global classroom and got to know many wonderful young people from a wide variety of cultures. For me, it has been as much a learning experience as it has for those students who have been active and self-directed enough to make the most of it.

When designing this year's project I had great plans of teacher collaboration and sharing ideas, lesson plans and also the trials and tribulations of being a teacher with a group of international colleagues. With this in mind, I started the Teachers' group on our Ning. Some interaction has taken place there, and we have learned that teachers across continents seem to be equally busy and preoccupied with the daily, weekly and regular duties and responsibilities, which often leave international project work on a backburner - understandably. Just read these comments exchanged between our project colleagues to get the idea:

I do realise that I must be slightly crazy and overly passionate about all this work, and I shouldn't expect this from other colleagues. Even I often find myself stretching myself too much when exam papers pile up on my desk. There are as many agendas for joining an international school project as there are participating teachers, and you just have to try and find common ground wherever you can.

Nevertheless, I am ever so grateful for the effort of my international team of teachers, some of whom have really been extremely active, coaxing and guiding their students with their own enthusiasm and modelling good online practices themselves. It's a pity that sometimes we teachers have to resort to using a stick instead of a tempting carrot to motivate our students, though!

In international teacher blogs I read a lot about the ideal of having self-directed students jumping at the chance of learning in an online international community like this, but, as most of us well know, the reality in institutionalised education is a different ballgame altogether. Not all teachers are willing to start changing their teaching styles and investing time and effort in their busy schedules, when there is no guarantee of 100% active student participation and positive attitude. I can't blame teachers for returning to safe old practises after being discouraged by uninterested, unmotivated and passive students. I could blame the system of grading, strict curricula, parent and administration pressure... The list goes on, but this is a different story.

The way I'm beginning to see my role here is becoming a teacher of a global classroom and trying to guide all the active students in their attempts of developing their online literacy skills and overall, becoming more professional net citizens. Very often it is a daunting task and I feel quite inadequate, as I'm only a learner myself. On the other hand, learning together with all these diverse students really makes me tick. Yet, I have a couple of misgivings, too. Sometimes I feel I'm trespassing in other teachers' territory when I start guiding their students online and giving them my ideas of better practices. I keep wondering whether I should contact their teacher first and deal with each issue that way. Then again, not wanting to burden and bother busy colleagues makes me think I might just as well sort it out with the students directly. Another problematic issue is, for example, engaging in the Ning chat with foreign students, especially when meeting them there while they are at home in their freetime. My fear is whether their parents might think I'm some dangerous online predator, so I have to be extra careful what to chat about with the students. I must say I was totally oblivious to any of these issues at the outset of this project. All part of the process and the ongoing learning experience. I often wonder if I am being too blue-eyed, trusting and innocent about online activities at school. At least it seems to me that many Finnish colleagues are much more careful and apprehensive about using open online platforms for educational purposes, preferring protected, closed course and project management systems, such as Moodle, for example. Well, for future projects I now have a list of new issues to negotiate and check with international colleagues in advance.

Student activity on a project Ning

Following the case study on photo sharing I wrote about in my previous blog post, I will now reflect on the other student activities on the Ning in our Asia-Europe WHAZZUP? project.

PARTICIPANTS OF THE PROJECT

As of today, there are althogether 216 members in the project. Since fairly good transparency is one of my aims for the project this year, I looked into all the member profiles to see how many member are actually active - the truth being that in any school project network you can make it look impressive with huge numbers of members, while in actual fact only a minute percentage may be active members at all.

In our project there are 24 teacher members, 6 of whom have been totally inactive. Some of them showed initial interest in the project, but possibly realised later that they couldn't participate with their students after all. Some, on the other hand, joined at the request of an active colleague, but as observers only. Out of the 192 student members, 27 seem to be totally passive, which represents about 14 % of all the students. Some of them have absolutely no activity after signing up, while others may have changed the layout of their profile page, or simply added a profile picture, but nothing else. In reality then, we have 18 active teacher members, and 165 active student members, adding up to a total of 183 active members.

Obviously, to take the transparency even further, I ought to really look into the activity of all these members to know the exact amount of active contributions of each member, and to see whether, in fact, it is only a small minority who account for most of the activity on the site with a

long tail of members with only minimal participation (cf. power law).

ON STUDENT COMMUNICATION ON THE PROJECT NING

a) Wall comments


One of the features on the Ning site, similar to Facebook, is wall comments. Each member has 'a wall' on their profile page where others can leave comments for them.

Today the total number of wall comments in the project is a massive 3379. At a closer look, there are 31 members with zero wall posts (more than the totally inactive members, because some without wall posts have, nevertheless, contributed in the discussion forum or blog or uploaded photos). The power law long tail seems to apply here, since including these zero wall comment members, there are 126 members with below 10 wall comments (ie. 58 % of all the members). One students has an amazing 215 wall comments, but all in all only 3 members reach 100 comments or above.



Naturally, the mere number of wall comments is a very limited measure and calls for more qualitative study of the interactions on the Ning site. An interesting topic for further research would be, for example, how and how much the different members are connected, or whether most of the wall comments are casual everyday chit chat exchanged between already existing friends in the same school. From the point of view of educational value of the project (eg. learning valuable skills for intercultural understanding and communication), a lot of interaction between students from different countries would, of course, be desirable. Then again, there is no denying that learning can take place between classmates in such networks, too. For example, as I have already mentioned earlier, most students in the project use English as a foreign language, and thus practise their language skills even with their own friends, since we only allow English being used on the site.


b) Discussion forum and blog posts

Apart from posting on other members' walls, the Ning features include a discussion forum and a blog for each member. The discussion forum can be accessed from the main page of the network, and there each member can start discussions and add comments to existing ones. Each member has a My blog feature on their profile page, but all the blog posts will be added into one joint All Blog Posts feature, which, at least in my opinion, is a little confusing. What I would like is a feature to allow grouping blog posts into different subgroups, for example. There is also a group feature on the Ning, but the groups don't have their separate blogs, which I would find a good idea. Something to suggest to the Ning team, I think!

The blog posts can be tagged, but I must say that being still rather unaccustomed with using tags, myself, I didn't think to guide members to use them. Some students have used them, though, but not always so successfully (eg. tagging something with 'the' must be a mistake!).



The discussion forum allows for setting different categories for discussions, but unfortunately I only realised this feature too late. Ning doesn't allow the network creator to add categories to discussions started by other members, which in our case would have been useful to keep the discussion forum under better control. As it is, it is rather cumbersome to go through all the discussions trying to find what you want. Next time, I will know better and set the categories in advance, as it is rather predictable what discussion students are most likely to start. Five years ago I did a case study of a project discussion forum and found out that, if students can freely start discussions, they are mostly about freetime activities and hobbies (movies, sports, books, holidays, , school and country info (climate, weather, famous places, languages, food lifestyle). Looking at this year's project, I would say these categories still apply, so in my next project Ning I will definitely organise the discussion forum into categories in advance, probably setting an open 'Other' category not to restrict students' freedom too much.

Today there are 60 discussions with a total of 426 replies (6 discussions with zero comments). The top five popular discussions so far are:



The number of blog posts is almost the same - 63 as of today. However, I must add that students seem to find it extremely difficult to differentiate between blog posts and forum discussions and I have had to keep reminding many of them of what we expected from the blog posts. Despite our guidelines, referring students to them and asking their teachers to keep reminding them, I would say there are at least 16 blog posts that should actually have been posted in the discussion forum, or alternatively on a member's profile page as a self-introduction. Compared to the replies to discussions, blog posts have only attracted 66 comments, and a total of 24 blog posts have no comments at all! Clearly, this is a weak point in the project.

The most popular blog post, judging by the number of comments (14), is also the most impressive, innovative and creative one, in my opinion. It is a group effort with several products about the European Union by students at the German school of Paris. The products are PowerPoint presentations or even one quite funny student video. It is wonderful to have such excellent work showcased in our project, but although the students have made the effort to write replies to the comments to their work, they haven't participated in any of the other activities of our project. The same occurred with some my own students, who I gave the chance to do some of their regular course work in connection with this project. Disappointigly, after posting one single blog post they weren't interested in participating in any other way.

c) Reflections

One way to compare the student members is to look at the two clearly different groups that all student members fall into - 1) those who were registered as a whole class by the teacher, and
2) those who had the chance to choose joining up as either an optional course, extra-curricular activity or independent study. Unsurprisingly, it can be noted that all the totally inactive students belong to the first group. Motivation to participate in this type of project is paramount, and a prerequisite to help a student become a self-directed lifelong learner. Of course, there are motivated students also in the first group, but it is clear that no unmotivated student would join a project voluntarily.

There is a special group among our members - a small group of five students from a school in the Philippines, who took the initiative to contact me and request membership by themselves, without their teacher. They have shown such admirable will to learn and organise themselves that they really make my Finnish students look lazy, apathetic and frustratingly passive in comparison. They have really participated with a mission, and even started their own study group on the Ning:



All along they have tried to help each other and try to learn collectively, which I have never seen among my students in my school in Finland!



In an earlier post I wrote about a student member from Malaysia, who also made the effort to join our project quite independently, and has since decided to try to use his active participation as credit to be accepted into a student exchange programme.

These examples raise the question whether the easy life most western European students are used to makes them rather complacent and unmotivated to study, since it often seems that for them studying no longer represents a stepping stone into a better and wealthier life. Life is more about instant gratification and having fun, where boring old school is a chore they are forced to endure. In such an atmosphere, even project work becomes yet another boring chore of 'schoolwork for school and grades only' or 'because the teacher tells us to do it'. How then to spark the inner motivation of these students to be active learners and directors of their own futures? Just today I read this interesting blog post, which refreshingly focuses on the positive value of social networking for students rather than highlighting all the dangers in them. My next challenge will be to convince my students of the positive value of being pro-active about their future by starting to create their professional digital footprints as early as possible.

One of our aims was also to guide students towards more professional writing, and also writing to an audience to start interesting conversations that would facilitate collective learning experiences. Sadly, this has hardly occurred at all. True, not all learning is clearly visible and can be hard to assess, but still, I can't help feeling rather disappointed at this result.

In hindsight, I feel that our idea of allowing students freedom to express themselves in the project has resulted in trivial quantity over quality. On second thoughts, though, I strongly suspect whether limiting wall posting and demanding more homework-style blog posting would have lead to any more interactions between students. They are simply not used to constructively commenting on other people's writing and building deeper dialogues. Maybe this is partly to do with age and maturing? Yet, I don't think we teachers should give up our goals of guiding students into more mature and professional online communication, maybe we only need to be a bit more down-to-earth and realistic with our expectations.

Another factor to keep in mind is different school realities. Not all teachers enjoy the kind of autonomy we Finnish teachers have, nor do all participating students possess adequate enough English skills for anything much more than casual everyday conversation.


ATTEMPTS OF IMPROVEMENT

Learning from all of the above, we have come up with two new activities to develop the project activities. The first one (already mentioned in my previous blog post) is the photo quest activity that has now been officially launched. Our goal here is to create a type of 'community art' by students really looking into the wealth of photos uploaded by all the members and then creating their new products with them. I am truly hoping for keen participation in this activity! The second activity will be an environmental unit that I and my colleague are teaching in one of our English courses. We will do it partly on this project Ning by opening up the course activities to an online Asia-Europe classroom of interested students. I am curious to see how many (if any!) international students take up this opportunity. Designing motivating activities for this is my next challenge.

Photo sharing on project Ning

I have been tracking the process of our international online school project WHAZZUP? in this blog. This time I'm going to reflect on the photo sharing feature that the Ning platform offers.

UPLOADING PHOTOS IS POPULAR

In only 3 months an amazing 757 photos have been uploaded by the 207 members of the project. Of interest is that the membership has been steadily increasing and we only hit the 200 mark last week. In the first month we reached 113 members, who uploaded 304 photos. In other words, in the last 2 months the number of photos has increased proportionately more than the membership.



THE NING PHOTO SHARING FEATURE

The way the Ning photo sharing system works is that each member has a 'My photos' album on their profile page, where an ongoing slideshow of that member's photos is running.



When you click 'My Photos', you will be able add more, rearrange them, make albums, rename them, as well as add tags, titles and captions.



In addition to each member's profile page, a joint pool of all network photos is collected with each new individual photo being added there, and a slideshow being shown on the network main page.

WHAT PICTURES HAVE BEEN UPLOADED?

I made a quick list of all the 757 pictures, trying to find common themes to them and came up with the following list:

• with friends 192
• self-portraits 170
• travelling 152
• hobbies/freetime 112
• scenery 95
• artistic 71 (eg. their own drawings)
• school 52
• family 31
• pets/animals 31
• celebrities 25 (question of copyright violation here!)
• miscellaneous 25

There is some overlap between these categories, since the same photo can come up in several (ie. a travelling photo with a scenery, a hobbies photo with friends). When given free hands to choose the photos young people want to upload, self-promotion through several self-portraits, and many pictures where they pose with their friends top the list.

Some time ago I posted some questions for students to answer in the discussion forum to gain some insight into their thought processes. Question number 3 read:

How do you decide what photos to upload? Why do you upload photos here in general?

Disappointingly, only 12 students have answered so far. They say they post pictures, because they hope others will like them, or to enhance their page. Some say they are trying to find others who share their interest through the choice of pictures. Some fall into the stereotypical 'generation me' category by stating, for example "I choose photos which I look good in. I think it makes you feel good to see a nice picture of yourself." It would be easy to draw conclusions about young people today being more self-centred than before - a trait even more accentuated by the easy access to online self-promotion. Just as was stated in a New York Times article last year:

Conventional wisdom, supported by academic studies using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, maintains that today’s young people — schooled in the church of self-esteem, vying for spots on reality television, promoting themselves on YouTube — are more narcissistic than their predecessors.

Yet, as Stephanie Roosenbloom in the article goes on to reflect, this may be largely a myth, and just part of the natural cycle of the behaviour of the young through the ages being a shock to their elders.

ISSUES TO CONSIDER 1: guidelines for photo publishing

We did provide the NETIQUETTE, which also contains advice about the use of photos, and have told teachers many times to make sure that they go through these plus the COPYRIGHT guidelines with their students. To my delight, I can say only a few cases have called for teacher censorship - weekend boozing pictures or insignia of extremist political movements have been strictly deleted by teachers, for example. Once again proof of the blurry line between freetime social networks and a school project environment. This is a crucial question, I think, when deciding what the eventual value of the use of social networks in a school setting is. At least I keep questioning to what extent they actually enable student learning, or whether they are just 'something fun' to occupy the students and, for the teachers, proof that they are 'in with the times' by using the latest online tools.

ISSUES TO CONSIDER 2: managing the large pool of photos

One problem at the moment is that making sense of close to 800 pictures is quite a task. Only 10 albums have been created so far. In my opinion, what could be improved on the services of Ning is to give the network managers the facility to later on regroup the existing photos from all the members into suitable albums, for example.



ISSUES TO CONSIDER 3: a purpose for the photos?

From a case study point of view, giving students free range to upload any photos they like (within the parameters of a set netiquette and copyright, of course) gives an interesting glimpse into their lives - or, on second thoughts, maybe a rather expected one. Unsurprisingly really, friends, hobbies and travelling feature strongly in the choice of uploaded photos. What I am wondering is whether it would be 'more educational' to give them clear tasks of what photos to take and choose with the international student audience in mind. Then again, this might easily lead us in the trap of the students losing their sense of 'ownership' of the site, where they have certain freedoms of self-expression and the photo feature just becoming yet another boring teacher-dictated homework chore. Would we perhaps see very few photos uploaded as a result of such an approach? If you read my earlier posts (this one for example), various aspects of this same dilemma have troubled me all through the project.

Once again I come back to the recurring problem of finding a working compromise between social and educational networks. Young people typically join a social network to mainly keep in touch with their everyday face2face friends - for example, to share pictures of their weekend adventures, to exchange gossip, or to plan events. Recently I came across an interesting interview with Danah Boyd, who has done a lot research into social networks and youth behaviour, where she said the following about sites, such as MySpace and Facebook:

These are frequently discussed as social networking sites, as though the primary activity of these sites is to meet new people and interact with strangers. In fact, young people are using this to socialize with the people they already know, their pre-existing social network. They’re communicating with their friends, people they know from church, from summer camp, from baseball. We have this belief that kids are just addicted to social network sites. If anything, they’re addicted to their friends.

The same seems to go for our project, where many still seek their own classmates - for safety, familiarity or to have yet another forum for their casual daily exchanges. Mind you, in a foreign language for many of them, but this doesn't seem to deter them. The 'birds of a feather' syndrome seems to apply in particular to students who are struggling with English the most. Maybe this same phenomenon explains why students seem to upload mostly pictures of themselves with their friends, because their friends are truly the audience they are uploading them for - forgetting the more edifying purpose of cultural sharing that their teachers might have in mind. Maybe for this reason also they don't even think to give their photos good titles or write captions to explain what is happening - their friends know exactly what is happening anyway. Comments on photos are almost non-existent, too (unless it's us teachers trying hard to break the ice there). Possibly it's the sheer overwhelming number of the photos that makes students lose interest and not even bother to go through all of them, even though they might find truly interesting gems amongst the mass. Naturally all this is merely my speculative guess-work into students' motivations, but it does raise questions about the possible need for teachers to guide their focus somehow to enhance the learning experience. Or am I just unable to see the true educational value of the new style of social interactions taking place on these sites?

SOME NEW IDEAS

Speculations aside, the urgent question remains – how to now make use of this magnificent resource of photos for learning? I have started collaborating with our arts teacher at school to design various 'photo quest' type activities to introduce to all the members. Students could, for example, analyse the style of the hundreds of self-portraits and see if there are common trends across the continents. Or they could find all the students' drawings and make a slideshow of them by using the online Animoto service, for example. Alternatively students could find trends in fashions in the different countries, compare any school-related information the photos convey, or simply produce a collage or a slideshow to depict the diversity of the members in our project. For the slideshows, we will need to update our COPYRIGHT information to really highlight the responsible use of background music and to avoid too much censoring afterwards. I can just imagine students producing countless slideshows of their own photos with their favourite top hits blasting in the background!

Finally, I think there is one thing we still need, though - a tempting enough perk to make students take up these activities. Unfortunately, the reality in institutionalised education in many countries is that many students are so used to being spoon-fed information by their teachers that they haven't found the need to develop very advanced skills in self-directedness and self-motivation. Standardised curricula, testing and grading also tend to lead to a vicious circle of motivation only through threats of penalties in their grade, which is hardly a desirable starting point for participating in collaboration and dialogue with students around the work. If students don't see an instant materialistic gain in the form of a higher grade for an activity, many opt out and don't bother to make any effort. Sad, but true... It takes a lot of enthusiasm, courage and pioneer spirit from teachers to still persist and carry on international projects in this environment. I am so happy that I have found many like-minded teachers around the world, who work hard to initiate some change in schools.

Student chat on Ning - observations on intercultural communication

As mentioned in my previous post, one difference that struck me in our international chat over a

week ago was the communication styles of European and Malaysian students. Before the chat, I expected all students to be well familiar with this style of communication and thus swim like fish in water in the chat environment. Maybe they are, but inside their own cultural comfort zones, where everybody shares more or less the same communication strategies.

It was easily noticeable that the European students, even though most of them were users of EFL, seemed to behave in quite similar ways. Apart from the limited vocabulary of some, they mostly appeared a rather homogenous group during the chat. But as soon as the Malaysian students managed to get online there was a clear change in the conversation. While European students started typing their 'hi's' the moment they logged in, the Malaysian ones waited for quite some time, possibly trying to follow what was going on among the others first. It is possible though that this wait was due to their technical connection problems, too. We Europeans could see that they were online and started greeting them and encouraging them to join:

We soon realized the considerably more polite and formal tone in their replies. Many of them kept repeatedly asking whether they could join in the discussion, while European students simply dashed in to introduce themselves in the middle of other people chatting. Actually this shouldn't be a surprise for me, as I have seen the difference in the general attitudes and behaviour of Asian and European students during our face2face student exchanges. Even the simple fact of them calling me, the teacher, 'madam' was quite exotic, since here in Finland most students simply use my first name.

Being 'madam' for a while was quite sweet, though. Just as being called 'auntie Sinikka' by Malaysian students during our student exchange a couple of years ago!

Another difference between Europeans and Malaysians was that the latter seemed to prefer private one-to-one chats to the chaos of the main chat room. Our students found it strange that the Malaysians kept asking for 'privacy'.

Further, in the previous example the Malaysian boy asks: 'Can I know bout you more'. This baffled our students, too, as though he was asking for permission to ask questions. They expected others to be more straight-forward and ask more specifically what they wanted to know, just as they themselves were doing. In this sense the Malaysian students came across as far more reserved, which made the European students feel ill at ease at times. A good learning experience about intercultural communication, though. Students soon realized that using English doesn't make us all the same, but cultural norms still play a huge role in communication. These incidents are also very fruitful to help students reflect on the importance of empathy and remembering that difference isn't strange in a negative way, but actually our diversity is a constant source of wonder and fascination. The real challenge is, of course, how we can work together and understand each other despite our diverse backgrounds and communication cultures.

I need to point out here that these were just simple observations during one particular chat session between a limited number of students in a limited number of European and Asian schools. I am not trying to formulate any theories about intercultural communication, and much of what I wrote probably is rather oversimplified and stereotypical. Nevertheless, this is how it often works in practice - small and insignifant case studies and observations over the years lead to revelations that consequently guide the ongoing process of improving intercultural school projects. What's more, reflecting on the experiences in this blog helps me focus my thoughts and has become a way of keeping an active project log at the same time.

Testing student chat on Ning

Last week we organised an intercontinental chat session on our WHAZZUP? project Ning. This was initiated by our members in Cyprus, who had a special theme day in their school and wanted to give hands-on demonstrations of their international projects.

PREPARATIONS

Adding the chat feature on Ning was a piece of cake really, and we teachers test-drove it beforehand to see how it worked. The more complicated task was to synchronize all the different time zones of the participating schools. In the end, we came up with the following time frame for start of a one-hour chat session.

Cyprus/Finland 11.00 am

Ireland 9.00 am

Italy/Spain/France 10.00 am

New Delhi 2.30 pm

Malaysia 5.00 pm

Korea/Philippines 6.00 pm

The time zone issue actually turned into a whole lesson with the geography teacher in Ireland:

On the foot of preparation for Thursday, I took out a large wall map of the world and circled each of the countries participating. Using the notice on whazzup, we identified what countries were in what time zone, and looked at the difference between Ireland and Korea. I think it began to dawn that as we were in class at 10 am today, other students had their days work done and were probably at home relaxing. It certainly gave pause for thought.

The details of the chat were discussed in our Ning Teachers' group, where teachers also indicated whose students would most probably manage to be online at that given time. The idea of planning a joint discussion topic came up as well, and it was decided that students should be prepared to talk about some special national holidays, as it was the time for the beginning of Lent in Europe with different traditions and also the Chinese New Year celebrations in Asia were not far behind.

THE CHAT ITSELF

On the day, the Cypriot students stayed online from 8 am till around 1 pm to see who they could catch for a chat. Eventually, students from Cyprus, Finland, Ireland and Malaysia got together in the chat room, which was very positive, as, despite the time differences, we managed to involve people from both continents in a real-time activity.

As for the topics discussed, quite expectedly it mostly revolved around young people's leisure activities - shared music, film and reading experiences.

Some more serious topics came up, too though, such as differences in school systems, politics or environmental problems, which pleased us teachers. School uniforms were compared, for example.

It has got to be remembered, however, that apart from the Irish, the rest of the students are learners of EFL, and for some this was the very first time to use English in an authentic situation with people who don't share the same native language. From that point of view, of course, we can't necessarily expect very profound discussions about complicated issues. Even saying 'hi' and talking about the weather is an achievement and a positive language learning experience for some. Students' uncertainty about their English skills recurringly came up in their discussions.

While students were active in the main chat room, teachers opened up private chat rooms to share ideas about the progress. This proved a useful feature.

Some students started private one-to-one chats, too. However, something we began to miss on Ning was a feature that would allow small groups of students to open their own separate chat room. The most students online at any one time was 31, and it soon became apparent that even that was too many. The discussion simply got too fast-paced, not only for us teachers with far less online multitasking experience, but also for the students, as this example shows:

Some technical hitches were encountered, too, which seems unavoidable whenever trying to work syncronously over space and time. At one point it looked threateningly that we wouldn't manage to get anybody from Asia to join us Europeans. Although the students were ready and keen in their ICT room in Sabah, Malaysia in the evening the chat just wouldn't work for them. The teacher shared their frustration on wall posts:

Luckily, their ICT staff managed to work wonders and they entered the chat room bringing with them a fascinating , and even partly exotic, feel to the discussion. I will write a separate blog post on the the clear difference in the communication culture between them and European students later.

REFLECTION

All in all, I would say this first chat experiment was well worth it. Our students in Finland were surprisingly excited about it all day. Some even revealed that they had never chatted online in a foreign language before!

Other participants have given quite positive feedback, too.

Just to say that the chat on Thursday went really well. As I said to Sinikka, I overheard a student say it was better than Bebo and that is a very big compliment. It created a great buzz with the students wanting to stay on-line for longer than originally intended.

I think that during the chatting the students have exchange many interesting information. They have spoken about their school, about the uniform in school, about the different time zone. Someone asked where is Cyprus, our students try to know about the political problem in Ireland and they try to tell the others about our political problem but this was without success. They have spoken with success about the weather.

And certainly it created momentum for the project in Malaysia, where suddenly more and more students wanted to join the Ning and become part of the network. In actual fact, all through the chat one of my main jobs was approving new members from there. I was quite touched by some of their reactions, which was a good reminder that not all teenagers all over the world are as blase about participating in online social networks as we might expect.

As a final remark, another feature missing on Ning is having access to past chat logs. Once the chat is over, and even during it whenever a limited number of visible lines on the screen is exceeded, the comments are simply wiped off into the void of virtual space. That is why I was busy taking screenshots all through the chat to have at least some record of what was going on. It might be useful to be able to go back to the whole chat session, especially as I enjoy doing small case studies on young people's communication patterns in international projects.

FUTURE PLANS

We are definitely going to try the chat again during this spring term, but in new and improved ways. Firstly, we will seriously have to limit the number of participants per chat to make it more manageable and productive. This will involve a lot of joint coordination and planning between teachers in advance. We will also need to find out about options for grouping students during the chat, as one colleague pointed out:

if we do it again (which I hope we will) it might be an idea to form groups with a student from each country in a group. With so many exchanges as on last Thursday, the speed makes it difficult to keep up, even for our tech savvy students!

Secondly, I feel that, despite the obvious advantage of everyday chit chat for lower level learners of English, as mentioned before, more attention will have to be paid to defining a purpose for the chat to enhance the overall learning experience.

Other forms of syncronous exchanges have also been suggested by colleagues:

with the Polish and Russian students we've had two skype sessions.. we could do that with yours.. so the students, instead of just chatting on the net, could talk.

As inviting as adding voice to the chat sounds, unfortunately we don't access to Skype at school, so that is out. There must be other tools available for this, but for now they will have to wait till a later time.

Guidelines for students' blog writing

The next phase in our Asia-Europe project starting up. We have devised two more sets of guidelines - BLOG GUIDELINES and COPYRIGHT - and sent them off to all the teachers for consultation. Hopefully we will receive good constructive feedback from at least some of them, to then adapt the guidelines for everyone to happily commit to In our closed membership group/community we made the conscious decision to control the features to an extent. This involves reserving each member's blog to longer, more in-depth writing on a specific theme. So far, we have had to ask quite a few students to cut and paste their self-introductions or short 'hi there' messages either to the discussion forum or in the 'text box' that everybody has on their own page. I must say I feel bad every time I have to point this out to students, who have eagerly just joined the project and taken ownership of their own page and the features provided for them, and keen to meet others have written their 'hellos' in their blog. We have now learned that next time, with a similar project, the basic structure of the Ning should be made clearer to all members at the outset to avoid having to ask people to change something they have already uploaded. Or am I trying to control things too much again? I have thought a lot about this, but I keep coming to the same conclusion that for students to really differentiate between chit-chat between friends, forums and blog posts, guidance and modelling is needed.

Both the sets of guidelines are rather long, and we have advised each teacher to consider whether their students might need help and explanations in their own language to get the idea. We feel this would provide for useful material for a whole lesson or sets of lessons that could be used in any subject that students might write about in their blog.

Our experience so far points strongly to students not bothering / daring / knowing how to write much more than very short chatty lines on other students' walls. Statistics today show that with 143 members in the project, only 5 blog posts have been written (2 of them by teachers!), while there are close to 2,000 messages on members' walls.



Yet, all sorts of essays are required as part of credit work in schools, so our premise is: wouldn't it be more motivating for students to actually do this writing for a real audience rather than just to their teacher for a grade? Other forms of expression (slide presentations, videos etc.) are also encouraged instead of the more common writing, if schools have the facilities and teachers the time and interest to guide their students in such endeavours. Commenting on other people's writing to get a conversation going also seems rather rare. That's why, we wrote a special set of guidelines to remind students of the importance of feedback and learning through conversations.
We hope that once students get the hang of it, they will soon realise the benefits of blog writing and comment discussions to their own learning. Or then not... My pessimistic side fears that this will just turn into another forced homework-type assignment that most students will only do half-heartedly if their teacher sets sanctions for neglecting it. Is it any wonder, though, if this happens? Isn't this what most school systems condition students to do anyway from the moment they first enter inside the four walls of an educational establishment?

'Friends' feature on Ning

Doing our online school project has made me wonder about the usefulness of the 'friends' feature on the site. For some time all I could see was classmates befriending classmates, which in my opinion hardly contributed anything to anyone's learning process. Because of my mission or attempt of actually enhancing students' learning through involving them in this project using social media tools I thought that this feature was nothing but an irritating distraction, tantamount to leading to unwelcome competition between students over who seems to be the most popular.

The other day, however, checking through student messages, as I routinely do to keep a watchful eye on what is going on, I found proof that the feature might serve a purpose after all. I had assumed that most young people swim in these social networks just like fish in water. Yet, I found this message written to a classmate:

Surprisingly to me, some of them find it hard to approach unknown students in the network. Maybe this is also reflected in the fact that the majority of messages so far have been exchanged between classmates from the same schools.

The benefit of the 'friends' feature is apparent in the following message. This student is using it as the icebreaker to get to know others from different countries.

I am now trying to find out from the students themselves how they feel about 'friends' in this project and some other aspects of the network through this discussion. I look forward to seeing if anyone is brave enough to give us any insights into this! It seems that all the students are still rather apprehensive about any initiatives set by teachers on the site. The playground mentality still largely pervades.

Our project Ning - an adolescent playground?

About a month of our new WHAZZUP? project has passed, and we already have 113 members. Some more classes are still to join, but it's getting to a point where we will have to put a stop to any more members. For the simple reason of managing and supervising what is being uploaded. In this short time, some active students have already attracted close to 200 comments on their wall! And, I am pleased to note that they are not all the typical short 'hi there' type.

For us teachers, it seems a constant tweaking effort to try and keep the site somehow organized, and especially to monitor some students' behaviour. Luckily, with our initial guidelines for CREATING YOUR PROFILE PAGE, it seems that we have got that more or less under control (see my previous post on this). Yet, other issues keep cropping up.

I have voiced before that this type of social network environment is not suitable for all our students. Problems seem to arise particularly when teachers involve a whole class in the project. You might think that all students should have the same chance of learning about online presence. Fair enough, but some students, even at high school level, just aren't mature enough for it. Personally, I have decided to offer this kind of work only as an option for motivated enough students, but I know that in many countries the school system simply doesn't allow for this kind of differentiation due to strict curricula or control over what teachers can and cannot do in class. Finnish teachers' high level of autonomy is probably quite unique.

We keep introducing certain guidelines to avoid the need for too much 'policing' around the site, and ask teachers to go through them with their students before starting. We thought we had taken enough precautions by writing the project NETIQUETTE, which says, among other things:

Always use acceptable and polite language. Also make sure that any pictures or videos you upload are acceptable. Better check with your teacher first. Online work is NOT private. Never say or publish anything that you wouldn't mind seeing on the school bulleting board, or in the local newspaper or being seen by your parents and relatives. Remember that, apart from yourself, you are also representing your school, city and country in this project.

I took it for granted that this message would be obvious, but still certain students don't get it. I don't think they do it to be awkward or to intentionally pester their teachers, they just DON'T THINK, and are not aware how their childish comments make them look. Possibly they have an image to keep up amongst their peers. Quite honestly, I am surprised that they are not even bothered about teachers reading about their boozy weekends, or their amorous messages to their boy-/girlfriends! Here is one example:

Whatever the reasons, the distinction between a private and a school website in far from clear for some of them. I have come to the conclusion that apparently much more needs to be spelled out for some students with clear examples. Naturally, in an international project, this calls for good collaboration and ongoing constructive communication among all the teachers, in addition to intercultural sensitivity to find the common ground.

Another NETIQUETTE point was:

The common language in this project is English, so use it for all the different communications - discussion forum, blog posts, comments on photos or other members' pages. This is NOT a private, social network to send comments to other members from your own school in your own language.

But still, weekly I spot students conversing with their classmates in their own language in their profile page messages. Again, I believe they do this automatically, especially if their English skills are a bit lacking. Perhaps it gives them a feeling of security to get in touch with people they know first, before breaking the ice with students from other countries. Or it's simply just part of being sociable and acknowledging that your friends are sharing this with you. Rather than second-guessing, we should really try to find out from the students themselves, what exactly guides their behaviour online.

Mostly it's very interesting to watch the online community build up day by day, and see what ideas young people come up with. But there is the irritating side of having to remind some of them of the project netiquette, and keep deleting inappropriate content. My dilemma at the moment is, how much leeway students should be given not to spoil their enthusiasm and 'ownership' of the site, and where to draw the definite lines not to be crossed. I still believe that a project like this should allow for some 'chattiness' and informal socialising, too. After all, small talk is an essential part of communication, and we are mostly dealing with learners of EFL.

An anonymous commentor on one of my previous posts raised this question:

Are there any young people out there, who feel they have learnt something valuable from the time they have spent on social networking sites?

I have thought a lot about it. From my limited experience so far, I would say one of the benefits of SCHOOL networking sites is making teachers learning companions with their students. I think it's rewarding for both to engage in meaningful conversations online, where teachers can use their expertise, experience, knowledge and maturity to encourage students to take into account a variety of viewpoints and perspectives. As for foreign language learning, an undeniable advantage of our intercultural project is the chance for authentic language use with others from many linguistic backgrounds.

We learn as we go along, and challenges are certainly good to keep us on our toes to improve. Soon the 'honeymoon' with the site will be over and we will get down to more serious blog posting. Interestingly, so far only one student has taken the initiative to write a more involved blog post. And unsurprisingly, it's the oldest student of the lot! Others are still more or less happily playing around, establishing their presence and learning the ropes.

The wonders of networks

Let me tell you a nice story about educational networks. It all started in November, when I set up our Ning network for this year's AEC-NET online project. I wanted to have the network in place before the teachers' conference and lobbying for new members in mid-December. I also advertised our new project in the AEC-NET mailing list to possibly get some early subscribers, which, luckily, we did. The common procedure is that teachers who take an interest in a particular project can contact the project coordinators by email to negotiate about further details and to sign up.

I also received a rather mysterious email, which simply said: "We are from malaysia feel free to join the project." I was a bit puzzled by this short mail and so asked for some more information.
In the next reply I learned the name of the school and some other details about the school, but it was all still rather vague. So I wrote back asking what subject this person taught at the school, how many students would join the project, how old they were, etc. By this time, this person had also joined our project network, but hadn't uploaded a profile picture yet. What a surprise to receive this answer:

"Actually I am not a teacher but a student. But I think it is okay since it is our school which will handle the AEC-NET Conference in Kota Kinabalu. Our teacher is Sensei Norizan Md. Said. We will try our best to make the conference goes well. And I also hope to see you there."

This truly proved one of the strengths of open networks to me. Never before had a student joined our project independently. Before, project groups had always been arranged by teachers at first, and with closed platforms, such as Moodle, which we used before, nobody could check out the site before joining. How wonderful, I thought! This boy obviously must be active, dynamic and motivated enough about intercultural exchanges to do all this out of his own accord! I hoped so much that I would get the opportunity to meet him during the conference in Kota Kinabalu.

And I did! At the welcoming dinner students from several schools in traditional costumes and holding colourful flowers and decorations had lined the hallway of the hotel leading to the restaurant welcoming us in. I started asking some of them if they knew the boy in question, and it didn't take long for them to point me to him. There he was smiling broadly amongst his friends - he is the one holding the yellow flowers!

He and his friends were so keen to talk to me in English, and I had the chance to hand him a little souvenir from Finland. After the dinner we had the chance to talk a little bit more. I really had to struggle to control the urge to hug him, since in his culture it would probably have been totally wrong. I was simply so happy about this chance encounter!

Later I also met Sensei Norizan, who told me that she had only asked her students to have a look at the AEC-NET website to know something about the organization whose conference they were to host. She never realized that one student would actually find an interesting project there and go ahead and join! She even told me that theirs is a boarding school and many of the students, including this particular boy, come from distant villages. Since he hasn't got a computer of his own, the teacher often lends him her computer, as he is so keen on online activities. Little did the teacher know what he was up to, but we were both so proud and pleased with what he had decided to do!

I have very good vibes about this year's project and hope that I can report many more uplifting stories like this during the spring term.