Online Communication (C&M Core: ICT Task 3)

This task had three questions to reflect and post about, these are included in my post to the discussion board, which follows:

Question 1: Do we have a Digital Duty of Care? (You may have students (or young family members) on your social media. Do you believe that you should remain connected to them, now that you are a teacher and do you have a Digital Duty of Care to these connected students?)

This is actually asking two questions: “do you think you should remain connected to them?”, and if you do, “do you have a Digital Duty of Care to them?”. I’ll answer each of these in order.

I think creating a digital division of content between personal (private) and professional (public), so not remaining connected to them, simplifies the concerns surrounding digital Duty of Care. This would mean you could spend time and attention on other areas of your teaching, and for this reason this might be the option I take, at least initially. On the other hand I see a lot of benefits to connecting with students on social media, if the difficulties of Duty of Care and professionalism could be overcome, and if that can be done is a reasonable way that is not too burdensome then such connections could lead to really valuable interactions with the students both in and out of the classroom. So honestly my answer is neither “yes” or “no” but rather “it depends on how well you think you can manage the digital duty of care and professionalism concerns balanced against the benefits of connecting with students on social media”.

To the second sub-question exploring the situation where I am connected with students on social media would I have a Duty of Care for them. Similarly I think my belief would lie somewhere between the two extremes of “Yes” or “No”. I think there are clear examples in which the answer is obviously “yes”, such as some of those Jarrod discussed in his videos: if I saw some content by them I would certainly have a Duty of Care to respond appropriately, similarly if they had contacted me directly expressing something along those lines I would have a Duty of Care. I see the grey area as being in situations where, for example, they posted something that I theoretically could see (that is accessible to me), but that I have not seen. Simply because I am connected with them on social media, does that mean I have a responsibility to regularly check all the posts they make on social media that are accessible to me? My answer to that would be no, although I could understand why people might argue with me on that point. Similarly I could see how someone might argue: “Even if you don’t have say, a facebook account, if you know your students do you have a duty of care to check their facebook posts for harmful content”. I don’t agree with that argument either, but I can see a spectrum of opinions that could be held on these issues, which is a worrying thing. At the end of the day it would come down to the fact that Duty of Care is a legal term, meaning “a duty to take reasonable care or to exercise reasonable skill (or both)” which although quite broad is covered under the Civil Liability Act (1936). It all comes down to interpretation of the word “reasonable” – my argument in the above cases would be that a teacher is simply too time-poor to be reasonably expected to check all their students social media accounts regularly, and I think that is a convincing argument. Also of relevance, the DECD duty of care policy is broadly phrased and doesn’t seem to explicitly mention social media. Similarly the DECD social media guidelines only mentions duty of care briefly and in broad terms, with nothing specific about digital duty of care or duty of care in the context of social media.

Question 2: Content Curation versus Creation (As we move to more knowledge collection and social constructivist learning styles, do we need to shift our lessons to include more content curation rather than content creation?)

First of all I think “need” is too strong of a word to use here, I think content creation still has an important role, and that one could be a good teacher without using content curation tasks. That said, I think curation tasks have a lot of benefits that could be made use of to improve our teaching. Tools that could be used for this include content distribution mechanisms like Scoop.it that Jarrod demonstrated in his videos. I don’t think curation tasks would completely replace content creation, but could potentially replace alot of it and be used as a complimentary approach for tasks suited to it. A brief literature review reveals that this is indeed a thing that is being widely discussed, all the way from relatively informal articles such as this one advocating curation as having the potential to “shake deeply the ideas of education and learning as we know them today”, to modern education-theory books such as Reigeluth et al. (2016)¹ — see this section as revealed by a google books search.

Question 3: Should the curriculum be limited to the walls of the classroom? (With more and more time spent online, should learning in your curriculum area be limited to the walls of the classroom?)

These questions are so loaded! This question is phrased with “should”, the previous one with “need”. But in this case I am actually willing to answer it directly: no. I do not think the curriculum should be limited to the walls of the classroom. First though let me make a proviso: I think they could be, the curriculum could be limited to the walls of the classroom, as it historically has been, and I think that it could even be taught well that way. However I do think there are a lot of benefits to the curriculum not being limited to the classroom, both physically (going for a walk, sitting in the park, excursions, etc.), and digitally (using learning platforms, outside resources, social media, etc.). I could see some combined approaches or compromises being promising: an idea that appeals to me in the context of teaching a mathematics curriculum is laying out for the students that all the examinable material will be covered within the physical classroom, and that all the additional activities (outside the classroom) are technically supplementary. For example going outside, sitting next to the oval and calculating the height of a tree on the other side of the oval using trigonometry might give another perspective on the applications of trigonometry and help the students by having them engage with the material in a different environment, but all the required knowledge about trigonometry would also have been covered in the regular class the previous week. I think one of the key important points to keep in mind when extending the curriculum outside of the classroom is equity: are you making some components of your teaching less accessible to a portion of the class? Maybe some students have severe hayfever or are allergic to grass making the sitting by the oval exercise less accessible to them (could you accommodate these students by bringing antihistamines and blankets to sit on?) or some students might have restricted internet access outside of school (maybe you are in a remote rural or low socioeconomic region).

Note: APST standards linked are as specified by Jarrod Johnson (who ran the ICT component).

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