It’s a rather impressive, if controversial, resume for a teenager: blamed for the election of Donald Trump, increased divorce rates, rising syphilis cases, and the advent of fake news.

Facebook turned 14 on February 4, 2018. And the controversies continue unabated. But there’s one aspect of Facebook that should not be lost in all the noise: the extraordinary change it has brought about in how we connect, communicate, consume and share content – in the classroom, as well as in other spaces.

Putting the words “Facebook” and “learning” together may seem like an oxymoron. But my research has delved into the role Facebook has played in shaping how the new generation consumes and shares content. Understanding this is pivotal to understanding how we should be using technology to teach in the digital age. Quite simply, Facebook has changed the way that children learn.

How students learn

That’s what I’ve discovered through my research, which used a cyber-ethnography approach to try and determine how students are learning in our modern digital age. This involved essentially “living” with students while they connected, communicated, and learned in a Facebook space.

I spent an entire semester watching and interacting with students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa as they used a Facebook page as their primary learning portal. The students were given admin access to the space. This meant they could determine how the space was used: who had access to it, how it was designed, what was posted on the page, and even the level of anonymity of their posts.

This provided me with an opportunity to watch the students learn, unfettered from traditional learning constraints. However, it would take a while for the students to fully explore their learning within this new space. Initially the students would often attempt to defer to me and my guidance. Only after I repeatedly refused to control their learning experience did they begin to behave in a self-oraganising way and allow me to observe their “natural” learning patterns.

The research revealed that Facebook provided students with a series of learning affordances. Affordances are “can do” oppportunies, some intentional and others unintentional, that technology spaces provide. In this instance the research revealed that the affordances at play were accessibility, connection, communication, control and construction. These affordances provide valuable insights into how students learn in digital spaces.

Once I understood this, I could turn my attention to the key need: developing ways of teaching, called pedagogies, that are appropriate for the digital age. Currently the focus on technology – the what, has distracted us from pedagogy: the how. Without understanding how best to apply these new technologies’ affordances, educators will not be able to effectively impact teaching in the modern classroom.

However, providing educators with a list of “how tos” isn’t much use without a system that makes the list easy to implement. As Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, says:

I can tell people they need to teach better. But if I don’t give them things that are easy for them to implement, they won’t do it.

Activating the classroom

That’s where the Activated Classroom Teaching (ACT) model comes in. I developed this model in a bid to create a taxonomy of teaching and learning for 21st century classrooms. A taxonomy is an ordered arrangement of items. One of the most famous of these is Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking. The ACT model attempts to provide a taxonomy of digital-age teaching approaches.

The ACT model consists of five digital-age pedagogies that seek to maximise the affordances of technology, modern students’ approaches to learning and the development of key 21st century skills such as creativity, problem solving, curiosity, critical thinking, etc.

The focus is a shift from passive ways of teaching (consumption) to active approaches (curation, conversation, correction, creation and chaos). This aligns with research that shows children are spending more than half their online time actively engaging: creating content, getting involved in “interactive consumption” and communicating.

Ignoring the tectonic shifts taking place in our classrooms is not the solution. Simply dropping technology into our classrooms is not the solution. Simply training teachers to use computers is not the solution. As British author and education expert Sir Ken Robinson has said, we need a paradigm shift, but it’s more than that - we need a pedagogy shift.

The young teen, Facebook, has changed how we connect and learn. But, as the OECD pointed out in its global study about educational technology: “If we want students to become smarter than a smartphone, we need to think harder about the pedagogies we are using to teach them. Technology can amplify great teaching but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.”

Craig Blewett, Senior Lecturer in Education & Technology, University of KwaZulu-Natal

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Collins English Dictionary unveiled a thoroughly modern concept as its word of the year for 2015: binge watching. It usually refers to consuming endless hours of movies or series on Netflix, one after the other. But binge watching is about the more fundamental issue of the world’s obsession with content consumption.

A recent report on media use reveals that teens are now spending more hours consuming media than sleeping. The average American teenager is spending about nine hours a day on entertainment media alone. Is this really the huge problem it’s made out to be? Partly, yes - because while they are engaging with a lot of information during those nine hours, they are creating barely any content of their own in this time.

This passivity is being replicated in classrooms. What will it take to replace these with engaged, active classrooms?

Consuming - but not creating

All too often, parents see their children on devices and say: “You’re wasting your time.”

There may be times when this is true. But today’s devices are not like the single function radios and televisions their parents grew up with. In the past if a child was spending lots of time in front of the TV it was obvious they were doing only one thing - watching TV. Modern devices allow for a wide range of activities from consumption to conversation to creation. Even sitting in front of a TV a child today could be doing anything from having a conversation, playing a game, watching a movie or creating a world in Minecraft.

The problem arises when children aren’t doing any of these things during their nine hours of entertainment media. The research shows that on average, kids are spending about 40% of this time on “passive consumption” compared with just 3% of their time on content creation.

It would be easy to dismiss this if it only happened at home, in children’s own time. But there ought to be concern when this trend is picked up and implemented in classrooms. This is unfortunately exactly what’s happening.

New tech, old methods

Schools are making a headlong rush to digitise the classroom. The media is awash with stories about tablets being rolled out, smartboards being installed or YouTubed classrooms. All of these technologies have great potential - yet at their core they are all about consumption. They do little to move the learner from a passive consumer to someone who is actively engaged.

The result is fuelling our students' “binge watching”, passive consumption diet. It is also leading to more and more studies suggesting that technology is not working in the classroom.

However, maybe it’s not the technology that isn’t working, but the way we’re using it. There is no doubt that our education system needs a revolution. That doesn’t mean doing what we have always done and just silicon coating it. A revolution needs new approaches to teaching and learning. It must be based on activity, not passivity.

Active classrooms are possible

What is exciting is that the seeds for an activated classroom approach are already found in children’s current media habits. All that teachers and parents need to do is harness them. Another way to look at Common Sense Media’s research is in terms of the active things children are doing with media.

While they may be spending 40% of their time on passive consumption, they are spending 3% of their time creating content, 25% on “interactive consumption” and 26% communicating. That means they’re spending more than half their time actively engaging with media. It is these activities that hold promise for the future of classrooms.

Teachers must encourage a move away from passive content consumption towards active engagement with media in their classrooms. For example, rather than providing students with prepackaged course content, students can source and curate their own content using tools like Flipboard. Rather than passively watching videos, students can be actively involved in creating their own videos about the content.

Rather than simply reading content through books or ebooks, students can rather engage in conversations around the content, with tools like Google Hangouts.

Towards an activated classroom

While the binge watching trend may signal a worrying focus on consumption, research shows that active teaching and learning approaches are good for students. The future of our classrooms relies on teachers harnessing this energy, combining it with the benefits of technology - then activating learning in the classroom. By moving students from passive readers and hearers to active curators and creators, teachers can significantly impact both students' enthusiasm in the classroom and how much they learn.

Craig Blewett, Senior Lecturer in Education & Technology, University of KwaZulu-Natal

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.