Enhancing Student Networks

Summary

For this project, I investigated more deeply into the question: “How might we use technology to enhance real-world, collaborative, learner-centered education?” The connections to this question are multi-faceted: first, real-world education involves connecting with others beyond (but also within) our local communities. The professional world uses myriad technologies (Zoom, LinkedIn, Twitter, just to name a few) to connect, collaborate, and form wide-ranging professional networks. Connecting students to professionals and mentors outside of their homes will open doors to opportunities that I could never create for them on my own. As I will discuss later, technology will allow students to enhance, augment, and shore-up their social networks thereby increasing the social capital onto which they will lean on as they make their way through the world.

The centerpoint of my inquiry was the book, “Who you Know” by Julia Freeland Fisher. From there I explored research both published and cited by the Christensen Institute about disruptive innovations and, more specifically, the power of student networks and connections. Mainly, I wanted to become more familiar with this area of research. What are the positive outcomes for learners? How are they achieved? Fisher had given the keynote address at a conference I attended in 2018. Since then, her message has stuck with me as "something to do, someday." This project provided the "someday" I needed to delve more deeply into her research and determine how I could use whta she's uncovered to support my students. I will plan implement a small project with my students during Remote Learning asking them to connect and learn globally (or, at least outside of their house) using technology tools I will provide.

A more detailed reflection on the book can be read in this blog post. Here you can read more about how this inquiry supported my professional growth, advanced my learning, and stretched me as a teacher as well as next steps for maintaining and enhancing student relationships post-pandemic. I also summarize and review the book alongside Fisher's SXSW talk from 2018 and discuss more deeply the use of Nepris in my student's Personal Interest Projects.

Course Outcomes

Competency 7: Fisher's book was impeccably well researched. This allowed me to dig through her citations and notes to read the primary sources on which she based her arguments. I did some of my own digging as well, to see if, since her book was written, anyone has attempted to measure the effects of "ed-tech that connects" and see if it does in fact enhance social networks as Fisher and others hope it will. The field is very new and my digging didn't turn up much. However, there is tangential research that is promising. For example, Big Picture Learning, a school model based on Sizer's Coalition of Essential schools whose #1 focus is on building student relationships, collected data on their alumni in 2012. Seventy-four percent reported reported securing a job through a high school internship contact. While data on the effectiveness of relationships mediated through technology is sparse, there is a well of data on the effectiveness of relationships to students outcomes. The Search Institute, a thinktank and leader in researching how positive student-adult relationships affect student success, has published data showing that, in the words of Peter Benson, former President of search, "nothing - nothing - has more impact on the life of a child than positive relationships."

Citations: MPR Associates. (2012). Big Picture Learning: High school alumni report. Retrieved from: http://1.cdn.edl.io/vGIpPEdMJfGhhJdIeQYfWT5OJ1oR2YyyjCgWLjqrqpaG8rLt.pdf.

Benson, P.L (2010). Parent, teacher, mentor, friend: How every adult can change kids' lives. Minneapolis, MN: Search Institute Pres, 13.

Center for Promise. (2015). Don't quit on me: What young people who left school say about the power of relationships. Retrieved from http://www.americaspromise.org/report/dont-quit-me

Competency 3: The project connects more soundly to this competency. I was able to create a short assignment for students, based on the sound research in Fisher's book, the attempts to tap the social capital resources found both within and outside of our geographical community.

Social Capital in a Crisis - This project in context

Probably unsurprisingly, Julia Freeland Fisher has useful thoughts to offer here. With schools shuttered for the foreseeable future, we need to focus on maintaining networks and connecting as well as increasing their numbers. Both strong and weak ties developed in school will erode without maintenance. This quote is worth including here:

" Before this spring, these relationship-centered technologies were still playing on the margins of the crowded edtech market that prized content over connection. Tools that schools could survive without may now be a lifeline. In the longer run, these tools could also prove vital to helping schools maintain a relationship infrastructure beyond just this moment of immediate crisis as they try to recover and navigate the unknowns of the summer and coming school year."

Massive shake-ups, like the one we are currently experiencing, create vacuums. They allow never-before-imagined changes to be suddenly possible. What before seemed like an insurmountable obstacle in the past (the bell schedule, classroom walls, tech restrictions) is now erased, or transformed into an opportunity.

The relationships we help students maintain and create now won't disappear when stay-at-home orders go away. If we are facing, as some experts say, a few years of bouncing in and out of school closures and lockdowns, students will need both strong and weak social networks to carry them through. Leveraging technology to create and augment these relationships will ensure they continue despite physical distancing required by the virus.

Another quote from Fisher:

"Putting relationships at the center of educating young people may have sounded sentimental to many mere weeks ago. Social technologies may have sounded distracting. Networked support structures may have sounded cumbersome. Now, in the era of social distancing, these approaches all hinge on an existential question: how can systems put relationships first as they rush to serve students from afar?"