From the “So What Do We Do About This?” Department comes a story about the tech savvyness of one 14-year old South Korean youngster who is making his phone play an important part in his education.
Insoo doesn’t even have to take the phone out of his pocket to send an SMS. He knows how to slide it open, which buttons to push how many times to reach the “Send SMS” menu option, compose the entire text message, and hit the send button — all without even looking at the phone. This is especially handy when he needs to send an SMS during class.
And so what does his network look like?
The first thing Insoo does after Hakwon [his school] is, of course, turn on the PC. Insoo has a difficult math problem as homework. He posts it up on Naver Knowledge iN, a popular online Q&A service with some 70 million entries. Within about 10 minutes of posting, someone chimes in with a good answer, and Insoo awards him with some “Knowledge Power” points — knowledge-based economy in action among 14-year-olds.
Hmmm…that sounds like Twitter on steroids. (I’d guess Shareski would be leading in “Tweet Power” points by now.) Read the whole article for more potentially “unacceptable” behavior on the part of young kids using technology.
So, without this turning into Rhetorical-Question-A-Rama, what should we as educators in a country that is about five years behind South Korea (according to this blog post, at least) be thinking about this version of the future? (Or is it already happening now?) Do we clamp down harder on the technologies our kids use? Try to penalize, even criminalize their use? Keep pretending that there are no acceptable uses of phones or other connection tools? Or do we start thinking about changing what we do and how we do it? Should open phone tests be ok? Should we embed the information and connection skills that the student in the story has into our own curricula? Oh, and by the way, who taught Insoo to do the things he’s doing, do you think? (Ok…Rhetorical-Question-A-Rama it is.)
I keep seeing this through the lens of my kids. Do I really want to call Tess a cheater if she uses the phone in her pocket to access her network to get an answer to a question on a test? My answer: depends. Let me see the question, but I’d have to say that most likely, if it can be answered by using her phone and by her network, then let’s teach her how to make good use of those resources instead of pretending they don’t exist.
(Article via Ewan’s delicious links)
Technorati Tags: school, learning, education, SouthKorea, networks, literacy
This certainly re-inforces the point that the ‘teacher’ is no longer the most knowledgable person in the room when there’s web access.
Let’s use the technology to provide a more engaging (and relevant) way to learn.
A central (rhetorical) question that I keep punch at is “What kind of questions do we ask on our tests, when kids are walking into the room with Google in their pocket?”
The thing is, I’m not even sure we’re capable of answering these questions, at least at this moment.
I really like the point system. What if we could put “knowledge power points” on their report cards?
Thanks for the twitter link, Will. That’s worth a half a point in itself 😉
‘Kwoledge Power’ is certainly a great initiative for inclusion on report cards. I’d call it ‘kudos’ and allow it to cover more than traditional ‘knowledge’. But what a great way to show that we educationalists acknowldege this ability in our students.
…. drat @ my useless typing in the comment above 🙁
Would not this be grossly similar to working collaboratively within the confines of the classroom? I’ve never been a huge fan of formal assessment, even within the classroom setting. Other than that test question, the question should be, did learning take place? I’d probably go out on a limb and say yes.
I loved your intro to this on Twitter: “This kid is dangerous”… Yes indeed, dangerous to those who do the ‘same old thing in the same old way’.
Students today depend too much upon ink. They don’t know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil.
National Association of Teachers Journal, 1907
Students today depend on these expensive fountain pens. They can no longer write with a straight pen and nib. We parents must not allow them to wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in the real business world which is not so extravagant.
From PTA Gazette, 1941
What’s next?
Students today depend too much on their phones…
The network is powerful, but there needs to be a core of people with the actual skills and abilities to answer such questions as Insoo’s maths problem; otherwise, the network is useless. As such, no, I don’t want my kid to use his network to answer questions. I want him to be the one answering other people’s questions for them.
@Ryan–I don’t want Tess using his network either. I want her to use her own, and just as we are sometimes the teacher and sometimes the learner in our networks, I want her to be engaged in those shifting roles as we are. But I also want her to be taught those “network literacies” by people who use them and can model them as well. How does she find those people? How does she assign trust to those people? How does she leverage their knowledge and contribute their own?
It takes very little knowledge, skill or effort to leverage a network and come up with an answer, and considerably more to be able to solve a problem.
What’s the goal? If it’s to learn how to leverage a network, the kid already has that down. If it’s to learn how to conceptualize and solve math problems, then we need to ask how the network helped him develop his knowledge and skills in this area. Did receiving the answer help him understand the math better? If somehow yes, then the networking was valuable. If it was only copy and paste, then learning has been thwarted. Technology for the sake of technology is not the purpose of education. Neither is networking without learning.
I think we’re all being pushed to recognize that homework had better be meaningful and thought-provoking or assigned to be collaborative, or otherwise it’s just a lesson in Googling(or texting?)
But his use of the phone in the classroom does bring up ethical issues as well….if he’s learning a new math concept or taking a test, is it really ethical for him to be getting text answers? I don’t think the ethical question changes just because the methodology does. As you point out, what has to change is the teaching, and for that to change, we have to understand how our kids’ world is changing.
If we’re on the brink of a connected all the time world, what huge changes is that going to mean?
Will, you were absolutely correct in your Twitter post. This kid is dangerous. He is tremendously dangerous to our economy. What will this kid be doing when he hits the workforce? We’ll still be teaching our kids the basics while this kids blows the world away!
Thank god for NCLB! 😉
I applaud Insoo’s ability to find answers. Isn’t Insoo practicing what we’ve been preaching re: 21st Century skill sets: navigation, networking, resourcefulness, negotiation, collaboration, teamwork, discernment?
How is is his teacher challenging Insoo to synthesize information? How is Insoo’s judgement abilities being fostered? What types of performance skills and identity building skills are being addressed?
Things that make us all go, “hmmmmmm….”
I agree with David on this issue. If new technologies are making certain types of questions very easy to answer by consulting networks, or rather by outsourcing thinking, then the questions need to become more complex. If a student is able to find the answer to a math problem by consulting a web forum, what is the value in his or her learning how to solve that problem on his or her own? Might the more valuable test question be an application of said information? Let the students mine the information from whatever sources they will, but ask them to apply said knowledge in specific contexts.
Should we withhold information and resources from students? No. Should we teach them to evaluate the information that they are finding? Certainly. The beauty of ubiquitous information is that it makes finding “the answer” a mere starting point for the discussion of said answer’s applications and implications.
Things that make you go hmmm indeed. But what does he do when his network’s down? Or even slow? Or… wrong?
It’s great that he can find the answer on his personal network. But that is not the assigned task. Presumably, someone has determined that there is societal value in him being able to solve the problem On His Own. If he can’t solve it himself, how can he possibly know whether the answer his anonymous friends have given him is correct?
Not to mention the fact that he’s cheating.
I have some further thoughts; I’ll blog them @ SDDC.
Wow, Corrie (15) and I must have read totally different posts. I’ve looked again at Will’s post and the original CNN article, and I see no evidence whatsoever that Insoo is cheating.
Somewhere there is a huge leap of faith (or lack of faith) from “he can text without looking at the phone or removing it from his pocket” to “he is texting during a test to cheat.”
Are we to assume that everyone using technology is cheating? Ouch (and ick!).
Ryan says,
“I don’t want my kid to use his network to answer questions. I want him to be the one answering other people’s questions for them.”
I guess I wonder what does it matter where the answers come from? If you you’re trying to determine credibility and expertise, that’s obviously a necessary skill that might be implicit in this discussion. At times, yes, I’d want him to be answering questions and other times asking them. That’s the way a network works, otherwise you just have leeches that make no contribution.
It would be interesting to dig deeper into how long and how exactly Insoo created his network. I look at the work of people like Clarence Fisher who are working side by side with students to build this in a classroom. That’s the ideal. Teachers helping kids figure how at least in part, what their network could look like.
PS. Thanks Will, for filling up my inbox with twitter requests 😉
I love the idea of points for effective use of knowledge but when you question the concept of cheating on a test, you are trying to connect 21st century logic to 20th century pedagogy. It won’t work. We need to make that shift from assessment of learning to assessment for learning, this doesn’t fit with the current top down set up of education systems. (even tho’ they talk the talk) No using networks effectively is not cheating but forcing a square peg in a round hole is futile….how do we effect change on such a large scale?
“How is is his teacher challenging Insoo to synthesize information? How is Insoo’s judgement abilities being fostered? What types of performance skills and identity building skills are being addressed?” Thank you Christopher Sessums for this comment.
What makes students get to school on time for first period and what makes them not care if they miss it and get there for second period? What makes a drawing class be silent where 25 14 year olds can be trying their hardest to see and understand and translate and what turns a high school art class into an extended yard time – all very similar issues whether it’s math, science or art, isn’t it?
We should be teaching kids how to use this technology to teach themselves. So yes, I think its a good idea to allow students to access the internet during a test. On another point, we should be asking questions that kids can find basic research for on the internet, but have to really think about to answer. Sure they could go online and write out every subjective test question to a forum or discussion board and get a wide variety of people’s opinions, but that isnt feasible. If its standard fact based objective questions that these kids are looking up the answers too, then we are still asking the wrong questions.
Sounds incredibly similar to a website I used quote often as a tech-coordinator, Experts Exchange (http://www.experts-exchange.com/). People post a problem, other people post solutions, the person with the best solution gets points, glory and good-will. Yahoo has the same system. As does a bazillion other sites.
So of course we should penalize him for having the audacity to use tools that we as adults would actually use in real world situations.
I think you know where I stand on this one. While I admit there are times when the phone should be turned off, I think teachers should need a compelling reason to deter the usage of it, not vice versa.
This is also a good time to re-think what a test is for. Too many of my college professor colleagues believe it is to trip up students who haven’t been listening in class. My own take is that a test should reinforce learning, and force those who haven’t been listening to do the digital legwork to find the answers. Thus, I’ve gone to testing on our course management system, allowing the student to take the test within a given window from anywhere and forcing him to review chapters, notes, PowerPoints, etc., while taking the test. I suspect that a few even team up on the test. But so what? They come away with new information, if they didn’t have it before, and most importantly, they’ve learned to be resourceful, a skill many employers will be glad to reward.
@Barry (16) – Never let it be said that I can’t be corrected. Quite right – the article says that he texts during *class*, not during *tests*. And more to the point, it says that he wants a new phone, the price of which is excelling on his exams.
My bad for reading too fast, and my apologies to Insoo.
@Steve Dembo (22), of course life is an open-book test – most of the time. I’ve advocated against traditional exams for years in favor of better means of assessment. As it happens I’m working on a podcast right now advocating “turning your pop quizzes upside down” and using them to reward students rather than punish them.
But we are in a transition period. Even some of the young faculty who “get it” are still wedded to the notion of the 70-minute Blue Book exam.
It’s going to take time.
I’m a high school math teacher who tries to enforce the school policy on phones. In other words, I spend a great deal of my day saying things like “Stop texting!” I learn best when I talk about what I’m learning with someone who is also learning the material or by explaining it to my poor, uninterested husband. Why am I forcing the students to be silent while they are learning? I talked briefly with admin about letting the kids text about the math yesterday, and their comment was “How do we monitor it?”
So my question is, how do we monitor the conversations? Do we need to monitor the conversations?
Erin mentions having students not text in classes. It depends on what they’re texting about. Is it related to the course or something else? And is there a need to monitor it. On monitoring, I would just say watch all the teachers listening to a presentation in a computer lab room and tell me how many aren’t checking their email. But it is possible for a well-designed assignment to keep students (and teachers) sufficiently on task so that monitoring wouldn’t be necessary.
If students, however, are texting about what they did after school or other similar items, well, learning has been interfered with. Despite all the hype about youngsters’ ability to multitask, the research that’s been done so far shows that it decreases learning, and not just a little bit.
It’s quite a talent to be able to send a text message from your pocket. After reading the article, I don’t think they are inferring that he is cheating, simply posting a comment on what’s going on in his day. Kind of a quick Twitter, if you will.
The way he is using the online service for math homework also depends upon the needed end result. He’s getting an answer, can he translate that answer to more permanent knowledge he will require on a test?
There are math problems that I assign at the end of each chapter. The students are expected to complete the problem and they are allowed to use outside sources, but they must explain who helped them and what they learned from the person that made the project solvable. It is a very hard exercise in some ways. My sixth grade students are not used to explaining how they solve problems.
The article could be written about many US students. I don’t think it’s limited to South Korea. It does point to the fact that we need to be working on a level of comprehension and creation and not just fact recall.
If teachers ask questions to which students can find a canned answer or which can be quickly answered by a text then the students aren’t being asked to invest themselves in the content or make personal meaning out of content and knowledge, and that is the problem. They should be asked to solve problems which require them to use all of those resources to collect info and data with which they then have to do something more meaningful.
As far as knowledge points go I use (and am happy to share) a “point-less” rubric based on habits of mind of intelligent people (Costa and Kallick) to assess students on a quarterly basis – and they are required to collect the evidence to prove their level of achievement. No points and lots of networking involved. Here is the rubric: http://shs.westport.k12.ct.us/jwb/rubrics/achievement.htm
I go back and forth on this kind of thing. I am the queen of Jeopardy and love it when I know some trivial thing, yet I also am adamantly against spending our precious few hours in school teaching students to memorize such trivial facts. What do I do “in real life†when I need to know an answer? I google it. So a large part of me agrees with the majority of people who have commented here that there is absolutely nothing wrong with what Insoo did. But the other part of me knows somebody has to give me the trivial answers if I don’t know them. If we are all googling then who is posting?
Amen!
I must say, I was one of those teachers who was frightened of opening the technology door for my students (ten years ago). Being a control freak myself, I wasn’t sure “what they might do” online. I did get over it, but hear it quite often from others in my building. Now I find myself asking my students, what will you do if I give you time to work online?
I think changing your mindset it necessary to EMBRACE. Begin with the end in mind. I want my students to show me they understand _________. Ask the students, what CAN they they do to show this. Let them contract out their learning…I’ll let you do this if you show me that. I guarantee you’ll get more than ever imagined and their learning will be firmly embedded.
This fascinating story underlines for me what is different and not so different about 21st Century learning.
What is not so different is learning and cheating. The issues comes right down to what and who is being tested. To leverage a network to assist learning is powerful and positive. To leverage knowledgable people to defraud the system into certifying that the test-taker has mastered the knowledge is harmful and negative. If Insoo fails to learn math, but can use a personal network to dupe the system, then Insoo has hurt himself. Personally, I doubt young Insoo is able to leverage this network during an actual test. How long would it really take to transcribe questions, post them and wait for responses? How would Insoo see those responses without pulling his phone out during the test? What Insoo is doing is asking for humanity to help him with his homework… instead of just his dad.
This is nothing new. When we called friends or did homework together, we leveraged a network. But when it came time to demonstrate OUR proficiency, we must work alone. This was true before and it is true now.
But what is different is the power of authorship and incredible scope of the human network that can be leveraged. If we fail to prepare students to become credible authors to the world and fail to help them effectively and ethically leverage humanity as their knowledge network, they will be blown away by those who do.
I think where these kinds of questions go awry is when we look at them in black and white; and within just one context.
What excites me is how many teachers really are tackling this. I know it is fashionable to describe teachers as stuck in routine, but I find most to be interested in knowledge work and working powerfully. The most common complaint I hear is not “we don’t want to change” but “we don’t have enough time.” And yet, somehow it happens. Paper replaced slates; ball-points replaced graphite; calculators replaced sliderules and through it all kids learned more and more powerfully than ever. I expect this trend to continue…
Thanks for the post, Will. More thinking to do.
My initial thoughts (following the Wow factor) are crystal clear:
We, as educators that know the positive educational potential of such networking technologies, need to be the ones that decide what should be done about it – before ignorant lawmakers and policymakers decide for us!
Get kids to figure out the questions that should be asked. Finding answers is comparatively easy. Devising questions is much more challenging. And Google may not know the answer because the questions hasn’t been asked yet. Maybe 🙂
I’ve thought more about your post, Will. You’ve asked several very important questions that can’t be ignored. I’d love your take:
http://tinyurl.com/376s8h
For accuracy purposes, the article states “This peek into the everyday life of an IMAGINARY South Korean boy named Insoo Kim…”
I am going to have to agree with Dan Maas on this one. What Insoo is doing is no different than what I did in school. If I needed help, I would call a friend or we would meet somewhere. Insoo is just using different tools, which happen to be much more efficient.
I do think we have to change our mindset on testing. I feel tests should be open everything. It makes no sense to me why our 7th grades have to take a writing test with only a pencil and some paper. Why not give them a thesaurus and a dictionary and anything else they need to be a successful writer. It is important to have the right tools for the job.
At the same time, we need better tests and different forms of assessment. Our students are only measured on multiple choice tests. Teachers are asked to practice these tests with them all year long. In the end students are pretty good at answering questions when they are given four choices. This stifles what I believe to be the two most important traits of the new “Global economy”, innovation and creativity.
Ha. Cheater! That’s right. He’s a cheater. Unless he credits the network and the answerer in his submission, and I doubt his teacher would be ok with that. Besides, this hypothetical is a lot of work for one little problem. It’s a lot easier just to copy someone else’s work the next day. Right? Ethics. How do we teach ethical behavior and use? Whether of the internet or any other resource? How do we teach that learning in and of itself is invaluable and that being lazy and cheating is unethical? He’s not dangerous or sophisticated. He just figured out that he didn’t have to do his math homework because someone on the internet would do it for him. He won’t end up as a CEO or Visionary, because all he ever learned was to submit other’s work as his own. Sooner or later that will catch up with him. Earth shattering stuff. Students have to learn that learning, understanding, and problem solving are the goals, not just submitting an answer.
I’m with those who want our kids to be able to answer the questions on their own. If they know how to think it through & solve it, then they can share the info. Being that person who is always looking up the answer isn’t going to get you very far in the real world. Knowledge is power; access to knowledge is second best.
I think that this exposes Korean education (and ours, too) for the finite’game’ that it is. I am using James P. Carse’s terminology here from his book “Finite and Infinite Games”. To quote him, “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
So what are we teaching in schools–finite or infinite games? Should learning ever be a finite game? The discussion should not be about nomadic vs webbed learners (as was considered in a very recent post of Will’s) but instead should focus on whether a particular finite game (say…grades in school) is worth the candle.
The answer to this question is one that should be occupying our best minds. If we can answer it, then we can move on to the best modes (nomadic, webbed, blended) for doing it.