Click Home
Social Media for Educators
Lesson Eight: Best
Practices for Vulnerable Populations
http://lone-eagles.com/social-lesson8.html
Return to Social Media Educators Home
Page
http://lone-eagles.com/social.html
Required Submissions
Checklist for Lesson 8 ____Read through
this lesson, including items marked “Read,” as separate from those marked
optional. View the short videos also marked “View” as separate from those
marked optional. (2 hours) Reflect and Contribute; ____Post to the class listserv YOUR
suggestions for what needs to happen with your choice of one or more vulnerable
populations with whom you are most personally familiar. Spend 30 minutes
searching for training best practices for one or more specific vulnerable
populations and ___Include three or more of your best picks in your listserv
message to Social-L@netpals.lsoft.com Identify what matters most, in your view, and how you would
propose the ideal best practices be identified, authentically evaluated, and
disseminated. (30 minutes) ___View the Twitter and Facebook short
tutorial videos and review the related sidebar videos, experiment with
searching for more specific videos such as using social media in the classroom.
Creating Twitter and Facebook accounts is optional
but be aware that learning by doing is the only way to fully experience and
assess the potential utility of these tools for your own priorities. While
dozens if not hundreds of video tutorials exist for Twitter, Facebook and most
popular tools and topics, the purpose of this task is to see what you can learn
about how to find the best “best practices” others have already worked hard to create
and/or collect. (one hour) ___Post to our listserv in a separate message, your own
individualized learning plan (ILP) for what your next step
priorities are, now that you’ve completed the eight lessons. State what
assistance you might still require in order to meet your personal goals.
Include your intentions for using Twitter, Facebook and/or other specific tools
that might include inviting others in this class to join you in sharing topical
resources on an ongoing basis. (30 minutes)
The Obsolete Teacher
If
you are not growing, you are dying. The relentless passing of our limited time
means there is no such thing as standing still. “Becoming is superior to
being.”
In
times of change, learners inherit the Earth
Eric
Fromm
Technophobia
and information overload, either separately and/or together, can cause one to
come close to a standstill in personal openness to assimilation of new
knowledge. Generally, fear causes one to engage in reductionism, limiting any
threats to the status quo; this is a natural self-preservation response. Don’t
worry about picking berries if you have just spotted a bear in the berry patch.
Drop the bucket and run for your life, or hide! When it comes to learning more about digital technologies,
some of us quickly duck behind the bushes to hide.
Teachers
who naturally excel at curiosity and self-directed learning, are building their
capacity to absorb more and more, literally exercising their brains and mental
muscles. Not only do their abilities to learn more increase, but their
self-efficacy, self-satisfaction, and most importantly their ability to teach
these same self-actualization behaviors continues to grow. Perhaps even more
importantly, their ability to exercise their imaginations grow as their level of
fear of new knowledge decreases, and as their self-confidence grows.
Imagination is more
important than knowledge
Albert Einstein
The Meaning of Life: Life
is life’s own purpose, to grow to a level of higher organization, essentially
the same for a blade of grass, or a human being
Technophobia and the Risks
of Becoming Obsolete
If
professionalism someday requires measurement of this capability, (“geekatude,”)
then those teachers who can most effectively model this behavior, and impart it
successfully to students, as well as to other teachers, and parents, will be
viewed as distinctly superior to those who are at a standstill.
Does
it make any sense for our elected leaders, and particularly school
superintendents and principals to know less about educational technologies than
the students? Will teachers who
know less than their students become obsolete in the next five years? Those
teachers and administrators with low abilities to keep digitally current, will
inevitably become vulnerable populations, and might find themselves unemployed.
Authenticating Best
Practices for Vulnerable Populations
The
chairman of the Alaskan Federation of Natives told me they are wondering how
best to leverage social media for their organization and membership. What would
you suggest?
The
new Administration for Native Americans, Alaska Technical Assistance center
director, asked me the same question; “We have a mandate for a virtual support
center to include distance learning and social media. We are looking at paying
$3000/year for Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate.) Which would you
recommend Ning, Google+ or Facebook, and why?”
My
Answer; Your staff might need training to all get on the same page for
professional uses, and all these tools are evolving quickly, and the tool
providers are copying each others’ features. It may depend more on how you want
to structure your staff activities than which tool you pick.
Also,
you want as simple a tool as possible for your clients, for whom ideal
self-directed instructional videos and video captures might be customized.
It
is likely your public outreach would need to embrace Facebook and Twitter as
the common social media standard.
How
to structure any of these to go viral, and collaborative engage as many people as
possible in purposeful collaborative learning and peer mentoring, is certainly
a key opportunity to explore, starting with assessing what’s working best for
other organizations dealing with these same challenges and opportunities.
Redefining Vulnerable
Populations:
If
you compare the freedom broadband can give those with physical disabilities
with the limitations the lack of digital literacy puts on those without
physical disabilities - as the new digitally
disabled, it might make people rethink how we define vulnerable
populations, as this would include many of our elected leaders.
Invisible Disabilities – may include our attitudes toward
self-directed learning and technology, both conscious and unconscious.
Redefining Digital Literacy (review teaching L7)
As
an educator, you know, your original college education was to prepare you with
the “right stuff” for a lifetime of high quality teaching. We used to define the right stuff as:
basics, breadth, enrichment, ending in producing a well-rounded motivated
life-long learner.
The
accelerating pace of change however has shortened the shelf life of useful
knowledge, and dramatically increased the volume of new knowledge that is
suddenly central to effective education, as evidenced by the sudden popularity
of Ipads and the booming world of elearning and social media. The list of new
knowledge topics we need to consider including across our curriculums goes on
and on as our integration activity in the last lesson hopefully made clear.
Hopefully
your ability to motivate yourself to engage in regular self-directed
self-teaching, and collaborative activities to keep yourself up to the same
instant of process has improved dramatically during this class. (Your
geekatude?) Consider revisiting
the info-diet and geekatude survey to assess your personal growth; http://lone-eagles.com/academy-info-diet.htm
The Most Important Vulnerable
Population: Our Elected leaders
Phd’s
and most persons in top leadership positions, who don’t keep digitally current,
typically still present themselves as experts on most everything. This relates
to the politics of appearances for people in position who generally ARE
expected to be on top of things in order to lead. The politics of control
requires them to present a confident image as leaders: that everything is
indeed under control.
Typically
they have neither the time, nor the mechanisms, to continue their education
specific to accelerating change inherent with educational technologies, as the
array of pressures from their other duties, like shrinking budgets requires
their priority attention.
This
makes them vulnerable, but not necessarily at fault. One solution would be
non-technical executive overviews focused on priorities for what they don’t
know that they need to know, such as the socio-economic capacity building
potential of youth entrepreneurship programs that elevate the community wide
understanding of the potential for smart utilization of communications
technologies for sustainable families, communities, and cultures.
Think
about what you know now, that you could summarize in non-technical terms in 5
minute jings for your own superintendent, principal and peers. As well as for
parents, community members, local businesses and other organizations who might want
learn they can better support your school financially, once they understand we
are all in this together.
Now,
think about yourself as an EDTECH consultant, and Elearning professional,
creating high quality Jings for specific vulnerable populations, along with
your producing short training modules focused on their creating rich media
online resources for their peers. Think about how your info-brokering skills
might help all these vulnerable populations stay current without their having
to duplicate the overwhelming task of doing this on their own. You are ready to
change the world.
Who Makes Your List of
Vulnerable Populations?
Who
would you list as vulnerable populations and how might WE work together to
identify genuine best practices, make them readily updated and available, on an
ongoing basis?
Seniors (Elders)
Individuals with Disabilities
HS Drop outs
Single parents
Rural citizens
Native/ethnic citizens
Teachers
Entrepreneurs
Nonprofits
Elected adult leaders
Low income low literacy adults
ADD YOUR ADDITIONS HERE:
America’s
Historic Challenge to Fund Mass Innovation
Throughout this course we have touched on
“what is broadband and why should you care.” Telecommunications companies have pushed for “adoption”
which means paid subscriptions to their for-profit services, without addressing
any responsibility to provide training or to even measure whether anyone is benefiting
at any level.
Broadband utilization is becoming an
issue, but without attention to the specifics for what matters most for specific
individuals, most pointedly those who are considered members of vulnerable
populations. That these issues have persisted for 20+ years is testimony to the
lack of digital literacy of our elected leaders at all levels.
Read: America’s
Historic Challenge to Fund Mass Innovation
(without the risks of
political backlash due to lack of documented results)
http://lone-eagles.com/getitright.htm
Owning a Grand Piano
Doesn’t Assure Musicianship
Analogy:
Giving everyone broadband is like giving everyone a grand piano and expecting
Virtuosos. For those inspired and motivated to learn, broadband can be truly
transformative and open doors for self satisfaction and dramatic scalable
global impacts, ideally producing more than the actions of a single individual
exponentially leveraging potential *collaborative impacts - in “concert” with others, world
wide.
This
single fact is perhaps the #1 message of this course, in case I didn’t hammer
hard enough. To meet the challenges of the dire needs of the modern day, we all
need to learn specifically how to leverage effective collaboration, which is
far more than the sum of individual effort. Exponential means the more participants the greater and
greater the outcomes. Facebook now has 800 million users, ambling around
playing and learning, but in an evolutionary sense it is inevitable more and
more examples of smart collaboration will soon evolve to the point where
virtual nations of purpose will outperform physical nations and more.
The
first video you viewed for this course was the Virtual Choir, remember?
We're limited
only by our imaginations as our one human family learns to join voices,
virtually.
Keeping
everyone to the same instant of progress on emerging better best practices is
not a warm fuzzy generality, but an
actionable dynamic. And if you are watching the news we are seeing more and
more dramatic proofs on a regular basis. What’s next? We’re limited only by our
collective imagination.
Alaska’s
Broadband campaign could be championing themes of the historic first
opportunity for everyone to learn anything, anytime from anywhere, and to focus
on self-actualization goals, not just for personal self-efficacy and
satisfaction, but in order to do what needs to be done. With POWER Comes
Responsibility.
When
Chief Sitting Bull was captured, he said “Don’t feed my people, it will make
them a lazy nation.” And when
Sidney Huntington, a well known elder on the Yukon presented his wisdom, he
said “Don’t give those kids nothin’; (and with a smile and a wink) Make them
work for it.” His wisdom shined as
the point was that self-esteem comes from what we learn to create ourselves,
not from what others give us.
Egov trends:
Due
to shrinking budgets at all levels, cost savings via Egov are under review. For
example, Wyoming’s 10,000 public employees are now using Google’s Egov software
suite. With 50% of Wyoming jobs in the public sector, many in small towns will
be replaced by services in the “Cloud.”
Brick and Mortar “One-stops” will be replaced by online services. This
creates a problem for governments at all levels. All vulnerable populations who
are most in need of govt. services will then HAVE to know how to get access to
these services.
Three Levels Comparing Needs
to Abilities:
From each according to their abilities,
to each according to their needs.
Karl Marx and Dr. Benjamin Spock
Level One to call for help as necessary.
Does
this mean they need OnStar in their home, where they can push a button and ask
for help? If they have fallen and can’t get up, there are lifeline bracelets
with a button they can push.
Or
do they need home Internet and training in digital literacy? If so, how much
training? It depends on their abilities, needs, and level of interest.
Level Two: Self-sufficiency
The
ability to use Internet to search for one’s own health information needs and to
use the communications tools to overcome social isolation. Skype and other
communications tools can fight depression caused by social isolation, and allow
a homebound person to encourage and support other who are in similar
situations. Assessing what abilities for self-sufficiency can minimize the need
and costs associated with OnStar services.
Level Three: Motivation and Ability to Assist Others
The
high end potential here has yet to be determined and we’re likely to discover
we are limited only by our imaginations. I predict most vulnerable populations
will find the self-satisfaction for being able to provide encouragement and
meaningful support to others will prove to be a major incentive, and will
become a national solution to lower costs and improve services at a time when
no other option exists.
What IF?
What
if we were able to empower and mobilize the imaginations of everyone who is a
member of any of these diverse vulnerable populations? What if we were able to
motivate, train, and hire them all to effectively leverage the exponential
power of effective collaboration?
Can we invent low cost short term pilot projects to experiment with demonstrating
“proof of concept” dynamics?
Imagine
a best case Civilian Cyber Corps as THE call to action for all Americans to
engage personally in building socio-economic capacity locally, nationally, and
globally.
Read: Mapping the Future: Mapping
Smartest Broadband Utilization
http://lone-eagles.com/larrypage.doc
Specific pilot project recommendations send directly to: Vint Cerf, father of
the Internet and Google thought leader, Google CEO and founder, Larry Page, and
Anne Neville, director of the NTIA National Broadband Mapping project.
Case Study Example: Independent
Living Support by Telecare Innovations
A
senior with dementia might need video telemonitoring, where someone can look
through passive video cameras regularly to be sure this person is OK. Another
senior without dementia, but possibly physically disabled, might be paid as a home-based
telecare paraprofessional to monitor the senior with dementia.
The
potential is lower overall healthcare costs, the advantage of allowing
independent living for the individual with dementia, and a home-based business
income for the senior with a physical disability. Once congress votes to allow
Medicare reimbursement for home telecare services, Mom and Pop home Telecare
businesses will be able to proliferate creating tens of thousands of new jobs
while lowering national healthcare costs by tens of millions if not tens of
billions.
But,
since this vote hasn’t happened yet, 20% of patients at the Maui Community
Hospital remain hospitalized (primarily dementia) instead of enjoying
independent living at home. Larry Carter and his wife have a home telecare
business, that is severely limited due to policies that prohibit caring for
those above.
Larry D. Carter Ph.D
(808)-281-6080
Manager-Partner
Maui AgeWave LLC
Review: www.mauiagewave.com and view the interactive care demo
Working
with Hawaii’s aging and disability
organization for four months, I wrote a lot on this topic. Since most seniors
will end up with one or more disabilities, this is a mainstream issue as the
Silver Tsunami is upon us as a nation.
Review: http://lone-eagles.com/hcil-resources.htm
50
million Americans have a disability, over 100 million have someone with a
disability in their family. That is one person in three. We referenced that
physically disabled folks can mentor those with digital disabilities, online,
too, but if we were to include the count on how many suffer from digital
disabilities, estimates are 100 million Americans still do not see the
relevance of broadband.
Evaluating Genuine Best
Practices.
A
number of large digital literacy non-profits do not post any free resources,
even those from other sources, as they are really commercial businesses. In my
mind this is contradictory to the public good mission non-profits are
supposedly dedicated to.
Conversely,
Lone Eagle is a social enterprise collecting and disseminating free resources,
plus decades of sharing my own curriculums, but I’ve been told that Federal
policy prohibits recognizing and/or sharing my free resources. Federal Agency
digital literacy resources have been posted at http://digitalliteracy.gov
If
everyone does their own thing promoting their own stuff as "best
practices" WITHOUT bothering to see whether better best practices exist,
then no one is being really honest and those we're supposedly benefiting will
not receive what they need.
Read: Best
Practices for Benefiting from Slow and Fast Broadband
http://lone-eagles.com/bestpractices.doc
(10 pages)
Review:
The FCC Lone Eagle Broadband Training
Best Practices Web Site
U.S. Federal Communications Commission's Native American
Division has posted
broadband training best practices http://lone-eagles.com/best.htm
on their www.fcc.gov/indians site
(listed as Examples of Broadband Training Best Practices) in their Internet
Resources listing: http://www.fcc.gov/indians/internetresources/
Optional Reading
Global
Best Practices for ICT Capacity-building Activities for Rural Communities http://lone-eagles.com/social-engineering.htm
A Lone Eagle Whitepaper presented to 21
nations at the request of NTIA, for the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation
summit in Tokyo, Japan, 2008.
Lone Eagle Online
Curriculums and Guides
http://lone-eagles.com/guides.htm
Essays on Native
innovations;
http://lone-eagles.com/nativehearts.htm
Recommendations for 36
Tribal Colleges
http://lone-eagles.com/aihec.htm
Accelerated
Learning Activity: Quickly Learn Twitter, Facebook and Tweetdeck
Required: View the videos marked View:
Optional: Creating a Twitter and Facebook account
Less is More: Microblogging on Twitter
Twitter is popular as a micro-blogging solution which limits messages to 128 character – forcing brevity and ideally producing palatable wisdom bits when aggregated together, to make best use of our limited time, and some level of condensed useful information.
Optional: Create a Twitter account,
and post your own theme on your Twitter Homepage. Sign up to follow at least
three professional persons who are actively using twitter, and for two weeks
post your own tweets a minimum of once a day. Post your twitter tag like
@fodasz to the class listserv.
View: the Twitter short video at http://commoncraft.com
View: Twitter for Beginners http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwn-8mRB_I8
Spend a half hour reviewing Twitter Basics at https://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics
with more at http://twitter.com
Use one of the url shortening sites to post at least one
URL.
For example; go to http://bit.ly and enter a url and it will give you
one back that is shorter. I just did this for lone-eagles.com and in 2 seconds
it gave me; http://bit.ly/u9iDvu
View: Four Twitter apps for educators
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYWYSI_j-kk
Optional: Create
a Facebook account, if
you don’t already have one, and build your understanding of what you can do to
promote a cause, and/or your instructional consulting business, by learning to
post content using as many Facebook tools as you have time to learn. Note most
training videos are under 5 minutes, and move quickly, as is generally accepted
as the required standard.
View: Learning
Facebook’s New Features
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uJNRpYyot8
(7 minutes)
I
found this at youtube simply by searching for learning facebook and since this
video is from hottipscentral.com I now have that sight for “more like this.”
Note this is one of a series of videos and the link to the next one is at the
upper right of this video. In question is are there better sites than this one;
very likely.
View: Facebook
Top 20 Learning Applications
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRhvnTHAqek
I
hope you are getting the idea how easy this can be, at this link note the long
list of videos specific to using Facebook in the classroom on the right
sidebar.
Lots
of videos on social media if you search for social media in the classroom, in
education, etc., but how do you find the best ones? Those would be promoted by
teachers turned consultants who post the best of the best via their blogs,
twitter, and other ways of displaying their expertise.
I
searched - learning tweetdeck - and found
View: “Learning
Tweetdeck for Rapid Elearning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo_QvekteJI
Finishing This Class: Your
Debriefing
You
have an eight hour final project to propose to your instructor for approval and
suggestions, to be web-based and related to your priority interests. Once your
instructor received this final required submission your Pass for the Class will
be sent to APU, which processes grades very quickly and will send you
confirmation via email.
You
are welcome to remain on the class listserv, to continue to receive resource
updates from your instructor, and present and future participants. You are
welcome to continue to ask questions and interact via the listserv with both
current and future class participants.
You
will still have access to the class wiki, but might want to start your own and
cutnpaste the resources you want have control over from all wiki pages related
to this class. The instructor will be adding new wiki pages with the best
resources shared in this class, and others, at http://web2fork12classrooms.pbworks.com You have unrestricted access to all
Lone Eagle online resources. (Over 700 web pages) This includes the content of
other Lone Eagle courses as listed at http://lone-eagles.com/teachercreated.htm
(But
you will still have to pay APU for recert credits.)
You
will still have access to the class Ning, and our Google Group, but remember neither
of these are public.
You
are invited to continue to ask for assistance from your instructor, and are now
in the elite group of those who understand the power to change the world is at
your fingertips. Make It Happen!
Conclusion:
During
this course, noting only a fraction were able to stick to doing a lesson a
week, it was clear some had higher capacity than others to absorb new
information, follow instructions, and to quickly ask the instructor for help,
before allowing frustration to become an issue. Our Social Media Theme, and my attempts to be more friendly
than formal, made this class a bit different than any I’ve taught before,
particularly with being able to Skype early on to diffuse any potential
tensions. The offer of individualizing and customizing the lessons was embraced
by a few but not all.
The
informality of this course was embraced by some, and others found this
uncomfortable – wanting to know their grades, and assurances related to the
traditional formal structure of courses and classes. This understandable
tension is due to the reality that we are all transitioning from a traditional
formal structure of learning to a new structure, as (to state it one last time)
Everyone both learner and
teacher, both consumer and producer,
all the time!
Final Instructor Feedback
on Your Lesson Feedback
My
own learning is that I see it as inevitable that educators are going to need
ongoing updates targeted to their individual abilities, interests, and both
strengths and particularly weaknesses. Measuring their geekatude abilities and
metering the right amount of new information both in volume and at the level
they are ready for, will prove essential. Individualized learning, with a process
to accelerate one’s learning motivations and abilities integrating many new
tools and methods appears to be the direction forward for education at all
levels. We all really are going to need, and want, the best “best practices”
delivering to use daily, classroom ready rich media units and updates so we can
spend less time on class preparation and more time individually mentoring our
students…as the Khan Academy video suggests in not only possible, but is
quickly becoming a preferred best practice.
Lesson Feedback:
You're invited
to privately email your instructor:
1. What areas, if any, did you have trouble with during this lesson?
2. What questions remain now that you've finished this lesson?
3. Approximately how much time did you devote to this lesson?
4. What improvements would you like to suggest?