Last year, when I purchased my iPhone, I braced myself for the 4-hour online tutorial to learn how to navigate the device.  However, just as I was sitting down to begin the tutorial, my 8 year-old son told me not to waste my time.  He could teach me in 20 minutes, he stated boldly.  All he needed was a little time to "play" with the phone.  Sure enough, he proved to be a better and more entertaining teacher than the online tutorial and I fast learned the basics of iPhone use.  He continues to be my iPhone navigator, updating the phone, looking for "cool" apps to add and explaining the phone to me in clear, easy to understand language. Technology has flipped our roles.  It used to be that parents and teachers taught children.  Now, the reverse is true and the quicker we can grasp this concept, the better equipped we will all be to live in the 21st century.  President Obama knows this.  He has retooled government's approach to communication.  Each week, he uploads his weekly address to YouTube, the White House web site invites viewer interaction and he even found a way to hold onto his BlackBerry.  And, the President has enlisted a chief technology officer to rewire the government's whole technology apparatus.      

Schools need to do the same.  Students are fast growing disenchanted with the snail's pace of change going on in classrooms regarding teaching with technology. Thankfully, some teachers have grabbed the mantle and are taking steps to meet students where they are in the online world.  One talented teacher cooked up an entire 20th century China project on Facebook.  Students adopted the personalities of Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong and Chang Kai-shek and created and updated Facebook pages and profiles, replete with photos and wall postings.  In the words of the teacher:  "This project changed the classroom.  Students were so motivated and put far more hours into their research than they would have done with a traditional project."  The best part about this project was the organic way it developed in the hands of a teacher who listens to her students.  As the class brainstormed the beginning stages of the unit, one of the students simply suggested that the class create Facebook pages for the three leaders and be required to chat, post and debate online.  Instead of balking at this potentially outlandish idea, this teacher jumped at the opportunity.  This is exactly the kind of collaborative learning that the 21st century demands, but it does mean surrendering a bit of curricular control to the students.  For many teachers, letting students "run" the show poses a challenge to the traditional "sage on the stage" model, even in the most progressive of teaching environments.  The time has come to turn the reins over to the students. 

This is the second in a series of posts examining the educational implications of an eight-part series called If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead, a white paper written for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) by Henry Jenkins and colleagues (Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf, and Joshua Green). These posts are written by Dan Hickey, Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Indiana University; Michelle Honeyford, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Culture, Literacy, and Language Education; and Jenna McWilliams, a writer and curriculum developer at Project New Media Literacies.

In this post, we use the contrasting models of "sticky" and "spreadable" media practices to consider two different approaches to developing, promoting, and disseminating curricular materials in educational environments. Specifically, we liken corporate efforts to create sticky websites and viral messages to the experimental validation and centralized dissemination of what we call disseminated instructional routines (DIRs). Just as most efforts to create "sticky" media environments have failed to capture and retain consumers, we argued that most centralized efforts to reform education have similarly failed at their stated goal of increasing gains on targeted tests, or improving education more broadly. Rather, DIR-focused efforts have actually created barriers to creating and sharing of more worthwhile approaches, which we are calling spreadable educational practices (SEPs). We believe that such an approach can better support wholesale improvement of educational practice, while also delivering measurable and consistent gains on standardized achievement tests.

This is the first entry in a planned series of blogposts taking up media scholar Henry Jenkins' notion of spreadability and considering the application of this idea to educational practices. The posts are co-written by Daniel T. Hickey, Michelle Honeyford, and Jenna McWilliams.

In his blog Confessions of an Aca/Fan (as in Academic/Fan) media scholar Henry Jenkins has serially posted eight chapters from a white paper entitled If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Jenkins, Li, Krauskopf, & Green, 2009). The paper rejects prevailing notions of viral media, memes, and stickiness for ignoring key aspects of the participatory culture in which ideas spread among individuals and become part of contemporary cultural knowledge. The authors then introduce the notion of spreadability as a more useful and productive way of thinking about these phenomena.

Project NML has completed its first teachers' strategy guide, called Reading in a Participatory Culture, and we're field testing it at several schools. Though the curriculum itself is not quite ready for prime time--we'll most likely give the whole thing a pretty significant overhaul after we see the results of implementation--I wanted to show you just the introduction to the guide.

Last week, Henry, Erin, Kelly, Deb (who is back as a staff researcher), and I had our very first meeting to talk about our new Teachers' Strategy Guide project, which will be all about mapping...A map of the internet circa 2003 showing the connections between different internet routers, from the Opte Project.

Randall Munroe's 2007 map of the internet, from xkcd.

Because the meeting was so interesting and I'm so excited about this project, I thought I'd blog about it. You know how much we NMLers like to keep everyone updated on our projects at every phase. Sometimes watching things unfold is the coolest part!

I've been suffering lately from Drop-In-The-Bucket Syndrome, a disorder common among educational researchers. Symptoms include the following: A sense of fatigue, malaise, or feeling overwhelmed; slight to extreme insomnia, often accompanied by extremely vivid nightmares; and a slight to extreme case of vertigo, often characterized by the sensation of having moved forward when in fact one has barely moved at all.

Today, my friends, I want to discuss the possibility of using Drawball as an analogy for the participatory model of reading.

As we continue to work on developing NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide, we are lucky to be surrounded by geniuses who continually push us to ask, and try to answer, several Big and Difficult Questions about the guide. A recent question, posed to us Veronica Boix-Mansilla, a Principal Investigator at Project Zero:

What is the added value of shifting from a traditional model of reading to a participatory model?