Dr. Cynthia Solomon, as a computer scientist and an educator, has helped millions of children discover a love of computer science, and her contributions to education will continue to have an impact on future generations. Her work to make programming concepts accessible to children has furthered the field of educational technology through her research, writing, programming, teaching, consulting, and speaking.

Early in her career, Solomon discovered a passion for introducing children to computer science through activities and metaphors. She collaborated with Seymour Papert and Wally Feurzeig to develop the Logo programming language, which was the first programming language designed specifically for children. As a visual programming language, Logo enables learners to explore procedural thinking through graphical representations, most famously represented as a turtle drawing a line. Logo has been a fundamental predecessor to modern visual programming languages such as Scratch, which has helped over 40 million children explore and understand programming concepts. Logo’s turtle robots have also inspired a whole new generation of procedural programming apps and robots.

Solomon holds a bachelor’s in history from Radcliffe College, a master’s in computer science from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in education from Harvard University. Her first book, Computer Environments for Children, published in 1988, is a prominent piece of early literate on computers in education. Throughout her career, Solomon collaborated closely with Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, Margaret Minsky, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Lab. While working for MIT, Solomon led the Atari Cambridge Research Laboratory as they designed a “PlayStation of the future” (Infosys Foundation, 2017, para. 13). Solomon’s impact on educational technology continues through speaking engagements and events, such as the inaugural lecture at CrossRoads 2018, as well as through her involvement in the Constructing Modern Knowledge institute and the One Laptop per Child Foundation.

Solomon believes in “transmitting theory into practice” (Solomon, 1988, p. 1). In her career, she not only authored several books and papers while working at eminent research institutes, but she also worked hands-on with students in elementary and secondary schools to teach programming concepts. In an interview about her work with Seymour Papert (Stanford University, 2013), Solomon reminisces about riding unicycles, juggling, and balancing on Bongo Boards. Papert and Solomon sought to spark children’s imagination and understanding by finding procedural activities to help them understand computer science concepts like debugging.

As a newly-minted computer science teacher, I was fascinated to learn about Solomon’s impact on educational technology. I share in her belief that learning complex programming concepts can be a fun, hands-on, and active experience. As I design lessons and learning activities for my classes, Solomon’s passion for teaching computer science inspires me to continuously look for new ways to involve and engage my students.

Interesting Links

• Logothings: A blog about Logo by Cynthia Solomon [Blog]
• Stanford University Panel: Cynthia Solomon on Seymour Papert [Video]
• Crossroads 2018: Cynthia Solomon Keynote [Video]
• Constructing Modern Knowledge: Cynthia Solomon, EdTech Heroine [Article]
• FabLearn 2019: Lifetime Achievement Award – Cynthia Solomon [Video]

References

Infosys Foundation (2017, December 6). Q & A with Dr. Cynthia Solomon [Blog post]. Retrieved September 13, 2019, from http://www.infosys.org/infosys-foundation-usa/media/blog/Pages/cynthia-solomon-qna.aspx

Solomon, C. (1988). Computer environments for children: A reflection on theories of learning and education. MIT press.

Stanford University (2013, June 27). Cynthia Solomon on Seymour Papert [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14gcdiU7-lM

Attribution

Photo by stem.T4L on Unsplash

The combined history that Reiser (2001) and Weller (2018) present highlights many advancements in educational technology, along with plenty of dead-ends and failures. However, I believe these failures are necessarily productive ones. To find approaches that work, educators and technologists need to be willing to experiment, and to accept that not all ideas will succeed—or should succeed. The successes, along with the failures, offer many lessons for future endeavours to learn from.

A lesson from the past that struck me as particularly poignant in Reiser’s (2001) article was the importance of not using technology just to teach technology skills. He noted that as computers were introduced, their application was “far from innovative” (p. 60) and often used to perpetuate computer-related skills. In my experience working in a K-12 school, I’ve seen this trend as well. For example, a lesson might focus on teaching Adobe Photoshop skills, rather than aiming to teach broader concepts of colour theory, typography, and aesthetics. Teaching a particular app as the end-point gives students a narrow application of their learning potential. As I design learning activities for my computer science course, I plan to keep this lesson in mind: beyond teaching a specific programming language, which will go in and out of fashion and varies based on the goal, I aim to develop activities that foster problem solving and programmatic thinking skills regardless of the presence or absence of technology.

In Twenty Years of Edtech, Weller (2018) suggests that blogging is “full of potential” (p. 39) and is “an ideal educational technology” (p. 48). This is a lesson I feel still applies to business and higher education, yet it is in conflict with the reality I’ve seen in my day-to-day work in K-12 education. From what I’ve experienced, students are searching and turning to blogs as informational artifacts, but I see them increasingly less interested in authoring their own blog posts. With the prevalence of WeChat and WhatsApp, students are often engaging in closed systems of communication—able to broadcast quickly to a large number of predetermined people, and less often broadcasting their words publicly on the internet. If they do broadcast, it tends to be in a social media format: Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Is this a shift in the way future generations will communicate online? In my school, an effort was made to create and promote classroom blogs as well as student-authored blogs, yet the endeavour rapidly lost momentum. Was this a systemic failure, or endemic of the users’ dwindling interest? These results lead me to wonder about the age demographic behind the majority of blogs on the internet. Are the upcoming generations as interested in blogging as the generation that came before them? What will the future histories of Edtech say about the importance of blogging in education?

Weller’s closing sentiment for Twenty Years of Edtech was that “nothing much has changed, and many edtech developments have failed to have significant impact” (p. 48). Counter-intuitively, these failed developments make me optimistic about the future of edtech. The more we fail, the more we have tried. The technologies Weller highlighted—failures and otherwise—were both increasing in scope and in diversity. I am sure there will be plenty of missteps and unsuccessful technologies in the future, yet each one of these has the potential to lead to new ideas, or at very least epitomize the lessons we must to continue to learn from the past.

 

References

Reiser, R. A. (2001). A history of instructional design and technology: Part I: A history of instructional media. Educational Technology, Research and Development, 49(1), 53-64. Retrieved from https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.royalroads.ca/article/10.1007/BF02504506

Weller, M. (2018). Twenty Years of Edtech. EDUCAUSE Review, 53(4), 34–48. Retrieved from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/7/twenty-years-of-edtech

Attribution

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

To explore the history of educational technology, I first set out to define what technology is. My initial internet searches revealed that technology has a variety of dictionary and encyclopedia definitions. Beyond the basic denotations of technology as a “collection of techniques, skills, methods, and processes” (“Technology,” n.d.), I wanted a more human perspective, so I expanded my search to include videos and blog posts. Kevin Kelly, in a 2010 TEDxAmsterdam talk, shared his insights into what technology means, and presented a definition that I found relatable: “Technology is anything useful invented by a mind” (Kelly, 2010). Human Technologies, developed as a core subject at the International College Hong Kong (ICHK), expands on this definition to include cognitive, material, social, spiritual, and somatic technologies (ICHK, n.d.). For example, breathing may be innate to humans, but CPR, Lamaze, and meditation are each somatic technologies.

What does this mean for educational technology? Education, when seen as the “the process of facilitating learning” (“Education,” n.d.), doesn’t necessarily require tools and devices. Yet, throughout human history, we have increasingly applied our ingenuity to change the nature of education. Thinking of technology as not just a set of tools but also as a set of processes, I wondered: How have humans technologized education?

The Socratic method, from the classical Greek period, represents an example of early cognitive and social technologies in education. By developing a formalized method for debate, Socrates and his contemporaries created an educational technology that uses structured discourse as a way to facilitate learning. This form of debate inspired Plato’s Republic and led to the first concepts of universities (Smith, 1997).

The highly-criticized factory model of schooling—involving rigid systems and standardization—is a way of technologizing education to facilitate its application on a mass scale. Rows of desks, chalkboards, and school bells are each examples of material technologies, yet there are also social technologies at work: the teacher-student power structure of a classroom, and the timetable-oriented structure of a school day. Through my research on the topic, I was intrigued to find Watters (2015) offers a critique of how terms like industrialized education are often used “not so much to explain the history of education, as to try to shape its future” (para. 22).

The certification process is another way humans have technologized education. Receiving credentials through formal schooling can be seen as a social technology, one used to delineate a person’s knowledge into discreet units of education. These credentials are then recognized as interchangeable by many facets of society, which creates a “plug-and-play” form of education (Brown & Tannock, 2009).

Exploring education technology—not just as material tools, but also as somatic, social, and cognitive processes—presented an opportunity to consider how education itself is a technology. Is upgrading to “Education 2.0” (Vagelatos, Foskolos, & Komninos, 2010) such a new idea, or are we already many versions into this technological development?

 

References

Brown, P., & Tannock, S. (2009). Education, meritocracy and the global war for talent. Journal of Education Policy, 24(4), 377–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930802669938

Education. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 6, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education

International College Hong Kong. (n.d.). Human Technologies | ICHK. Retrieved September 7, 2019, from https://www.ichk.edu.hk/home/learning/innovation/human-technologies/

Smith, M. K. (1997). Plato on education | infed.org. Retrieved September 7, 2019, from http://infed.org/mobi/plato-on-education/

Technology. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 6, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology

TEDxAmsterdam. (2010). Kevin Kelly: Technology’s epic story | TED Talk. Retrieved September 8, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS1xL1qcBa4

Vagelatos, A. T., Foskolos, F. K., & Komninos, T. P. (2010). Education 2.0: Bringing innovation to the classroom. Proceedings – 14th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics, PCI 2010, (September), 201–204. https://doi.org/10.1109/PCI.2010.15

Watters, A. (2015). The Invented History of “The Factory Model of Education.” Retrieved September 6, 2019, from http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

 

Attribution

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

Click to view the interactive network in Kumu

 

We are born with one connection, physically, to a brand new world. Once that connection is severed we begin the uncertain task of building and navigating a world of social connections. For some this can be a rapid and exciting process, for others a more gradual and cautious process. I tend to relate to the latter of these distinctions. Building this network gave me the opportunity to see how my connections are made up of “a number of organizational structures, such as groups, networks, and communities” (Veletsianos, 2016, p. 2), and that each of these are generally small and intimate connections. My map is largely comprised of my family, friends, work and open source connections. University is the newest branch, and I feel quite fortunate to add this amazing cohort to my connections.

Social media only makes up a small portion of my map, as I’m always conscious of the tradeoffs of our time and information using online platforms, and I strongly believe in the value of human connections in our increasingly digital world. However, Dron and Andreson (2014) argue that “beyond what is practical or possible in conventional human interaction, cyberspace supports dynamic collective knowledge generation” (p. 7). With this in mind, as I look at goals for my online presence in the future, it may be worth reassessing this branch of my network and which ways I’d like to see it grow.

In this network, I’ve represented individual people as well as categories of people in green, which make up the leaf-nodes of the tree. The branch nodes make up the organizations or concepts that tie these connections together. Be sure to click the button to see the full interactive view.

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References

Dron, J, & Andreson, T. (2014). Teaching Crowds. (pp. 35 -70; 93 – 235). Athabasca University Press.

Veletsianos, G. (2016). Digital learning environments. In N. Rushby & D. Surry (Eds), Handbook of Learning Technologies (pp. 242-260). UK: John Wiley & Sons.

 

I’ve had the amazing opportunity to build open source software while working alongside teachers and administrators, and it has been transformational, both for the school and for myself. Collaborating on a daily basis to build meaningful tools, and having the freedom to share them with a global audience, has brought a whole new level of purpose to my job. I’ve discovered there’s incredible power in the intersection of open technology and open pedagogy, and it has become a personal mission to get this message out there. Many educators don’t know what open source is, or what value it can bring to education. This is my motivation to build a larger digital presence: to share what open source is, what opportunities it can create for education, and to build a network of educators and developers who collaborate, share ideas, and advocate for open source in education.

Developing this presence will require a shift in mindset. On a personal level, I haven’t been interested in using social media, and although I interact frequently with technology, I don’t share my personal voice through it. I’m content with this choice for my private life, however I recognize the need to reconsider this mindset with the aim to network professionally and get my open source message out there. In doing so, it’s important to me to cultivate a digital presence with an academic and professional tone, and maintain the distinction between my personal and professional identity.

With the goal of advocating for open source in mind, and the considerations for a professional approach, I aim to thoughtfully focus my efforts to develop a digital presence in three areas: Twitter, my MALAT blog, and my personal website.

Twitter

• Search for and follow educators, developers and researchers involved in open source in education.
• Create a twitter list of these accounts and add it to TweetDeck to help filter their posts from the background noise of my twitter feed.
• Discover which hashtags are used by open source in education, including related areas, and follow them.
• Share open source articles and blog posts I find through twitter to signal boost their message.

MALAT Blog

• Embrace the opportunity to become a resident and develop my academic voice . A blog can be “as much an expression of identity as it is a discussion of particular ideas” (White & LeCornu, 2011).
• Through my assignments, focus on topics that can further my understanding of the research surrounding both open source and digital tools for learning.
• Through my research topics, begin curating a list of articles which support the topics of open source, collaboration in education technology, and school-led software development.
• Explore my work with Gibbon and open source through the lens of academic research and theoretical frameworks. Discover who is involved in researching this area.

Personal Website

• After the culmination of the MALAT program, I aim to curate and merge posts from my blog into my personal website.
• Curate resources that help explain what open source is.

 

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References

White, D. S., & LeCornu, A. (2011). Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).

 

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Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

This conceptual map represents my digital technology use, based on White and LeCornu’s (2011) visitor-resident typology. Along with the main axis of visitor-resident and personal-institutional, I’ve represented the relative importance of a technology through its size, as well as indicated open source technologies with a dotted outline.

I found that some items were easy to place, particularly if they were closer to the visitor side of the continuum, because they represented discreet tools. Further to the resident side, the items became more interconnected with my life and online identity, so it was harder to decide their size and placement. Interestingly, this visualization has highlighted that since becoming an open source maintainer, the digital technologies I am a resident of now span both my institutional and personal life, which is something I should be mindful of.

Building this conceptual map gave me an opportunity to reflect on what it would have looked like in the past, and ponder what it might look like in the future. A decade ago my map would have been unrecognizable as the same person: I was highly active in a virtual world, as both a business person and a community leader, so the resident side of the map would have encompassed the majority of my technology use. Many years and life-decisions later, the focus of my map has shifted towards open source, and I’ve also become more selective of the technologies that make up my online identity. I wonder what my map would look like a decade from now?

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References

White, D. S., & LeCornu, A. (2011). Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).

Beginning the MALAT program with a virtual symposium has been a thought-provoking opportunity to step beyond my scope of understanding and learn about the wider open educational space. As an open source developer, openness and collaboration have had a profound impact on my personal and professional life. Looking beyond my experiences, I can see that open source is just one of the many facets of openness. For example, Cormier (2017) highlighted three broad aspects of open: Open to, looking at increased access to content; open by, looking at openness as a gift from creators; and open for, looking at how openness can positively affect learners. Reflecting on my definition of open alongside each new definition helped illustrate that “openness is a continuously negotiated space” (Childs, 2019, 20:46). Throughout the virtual symposium, it was necessary to synthesize the ideas presented and redefine my understanding of open.

In seeking to expand my definition of openness, it was important to understand how wide the concept of open is. In her slide “Complexity = Multiple Definitions of Open”, Childs (2019) highlighted several aspects of open, from open scholarship and access to open policy. This overview provided a great perspective of how my current open source work fits into a much larger view of openness across different sectors. Cormier (2017) described the complexity and growth of open as a rhizome, “capable of spreading on it’s own, bounded only by the limits of it’s habitat.” With this wide-angle view, of both the scope and complexity of open, I could begin to form an idea of openness as a whole concept.

Focusing my definition of openness towards the education space, Lalonde (2018) highlights three pillars of open education: Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Pedagogy, and Open Technology. I realized that entering into the symposium my definition of open had been constrained to the pillar of open technology. As a software developer, it was inspiring to learn about the ideas surrounding these two other pillars, and look for ways that open technology can support them. Watching the presentations, I found myself wondering: “How could open source help make OER materials more reusable,” and “how can open technology enable educators to try new pedagogies and share them?” I believe each of these pillars can work to support each other:

“Open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues.” (The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, 2007, para. 4)

In selecting presentations to attend, I looked for topics that could deepen my understanding of openness. Among these, I was intrigued by Cronin’s (2018) ideas surrounding the risks of adopting open educational practices. She introduces these ideas with a quote: “It has never been more risky to operate in the open. It has never been more vital to operate in the open” (Weller, 2016). It gave me pause to consider the risks surrounding my own work. The idea of an open source school information system can make many administrators and educators uneasy, based on the perception of security, support, and longevity of open source (Rooij, 2007). By advocating for an open source solution and putting this idea into practice, my school has helped model to other schools that this level of open technology is possible. Cronin expressed that practicing openness is not without tension; it’s complex, personal, contextual, and continuously negotiated. “Our work as educators is to try and negotiate that tension, not just for ourselves but for our students and the institutions that we work in” (Cronin, 2018, 05:53). It was encouraging to see that the MALAT program has also been built on this principle of not only teaching openness but modelling it through the design of the program itself (Childs, 2018, 16:02). I think by modelling openness, and by understanding the tensions and risks involved, it’s possible to develop greater empathy for those who are new to the idea of open. With this in mind, I’m keen to look for more opportunities to share openness within my network of peers and educators.

Through the course of the virtual symposium, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to continuously redefine my understanding of openness: starting with a narrow scope focused on open technology, and expanding it to a broader view of open education as a whole. I began the MALAT program as an advocate of open source, and I hope to leave as an advocate of all things open.

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References

Childs, E. (2019). Openness and networked learning in a MA degree [Video file]. Retrieved from http://ow.ly/bfPN30jxwXx

Cormier, D. (2017). Intentional messiness of online communities [Video file]. Retrieved from http://ow.ly/GBE830cUgEJ

Cronin, C. (2017). Open culture, open education, open questions [Video file]. Retrieved from http://ow.ly/L9ch30b2f41

Lalonde, C. (2018). Sharing and CC licensing [Video file]. Retrieved from http://ow.ly/De9X30jAeGV

Rooij, S. W. van. (2007). Perceptions of Open Source Versus Commercial Software. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 39(4), 433–453. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2007.10782491

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2007). Retrieved July 15, 2019, from https://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

Weller, M. (2016, December 13), The paradoxes of open scholarship [Blog post and Webinar]. Retrieved from http://blog.edtechie.net/openness/the-paradoxes-of-open-scholarship/

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Photo by James Sutton on Unsplash

A good research question could be seen as the narrowing scope of a magnifying glass:

• Find a clear focal point within a larger topic. An ideal question converges the ambiguity of a broad topic down to a scope that is focused and arguable.
• Seek to clarify a complex issue—with no obvious answer—through the lens of a timely and relevant question. Deeper understanding can be found by spending time exploring a topic of interest, and looking for the edge cases that are not clearly defined.

 

References

George Mason University Writing Center (2018). How to Write a Research Question. Retrieved from https://writingcenter.gmu.edu/guides/how-to-write-a-research-question

Royal Roads University (n.d.) Identifying your research question. Retrieved from https://library.royalroads.ca/infoquest-tutorials/how-start/identifying-your-research-question