Being Interactive, Online and Offline!

 

I know this is old fashioned, but two of the words that I have found most ironic in connection with online activity are “social” and “interactive”. The visual image of a teenager (or any ager for that matter) staring intently at a screen, often next to others doing the same thing is such a picture of isolation and anti-social behavior that it boggles the mind to call this “social” media. Similarly, when I search online for “interactive” activities or games for my Math classes, the response is innumerable online games and activities that are played by one player with one computer. Interactive? … with who?

This is not meant to be a negative rant about the influence of technology, rather an inquiry into how technology can help to make a classroom truly interactive, and in some cases more authentically social. No doubt many educators have the same purpose as they work toward integrating technology into their classrooms. The search for digital products that fit our pedagogy can be grueling, and the last thing we want is to waste a bunch of time sifting through potential products, simply because their designers decided to use the word “interactive” in the product description.

What Does Interactive Even Mean?

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary has two very different, and in some ways conflicting simple definitions of “interactive”:

1. Designed to respond to the actions, commands, etc., of a user
2. Requiring people to talk with each other or do things together
   (Merriam-Webster, 2015)

It seems interesting to me that the first definition is clearly the most recently developed, and relates directly to electronic media. It is this definition that makes website designers accurate when they call a product “interactive”; almost without exception online learning activities are designed to engage a learner with the program in a series of incrementally more challenging steps, or in different types of challenges reinforcing an idea or specific learning.  They are in one sense interactive. But the problem is that this form of interaction often includes only one human being, and may not always be the definition that educators are trying to achieve when choosing interactive activities for their classrooms. In my own classroom it is very often the social aspect of the second (much older) definition that I am looking for, as a complement to other more ‘traditional’ ways of learning that involve whole group instruction and individual completion of work.

Learning Socially

Albert Bandura’s social learning theory and Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory show that social interaction is critical in the process of cognitive development. (Online College, 2011) Vygotsky recognized that “learning always occurs and cannot be separated from a social context” (Neff) The challenge then, is to replicate the kind of genuine social activity in an online learning environment, that can occur with relative ease in a classroom where students are physically present.

I have a class set of interactive white boards in my classroom. They are sheets of white plastic that students can use to write on with whiteboard markers. The activities they are used for usually involve partners or small groups solving problems and displaying their thinking and solutions on clearly visible surfaces with non-permanent ink. They involve students talking together, looking over one another’s shoulders, making corrections in response to others’ work … they are objects of conversation and collective writing. They are truly interactive whiteboards!

So the challenge I am now faced with is to use technology and even social media in a way that allows students online to converse and share ideas in a similar way to that of my students in the classroom.  As anti-social as it appears when I see students staring intently at the screens of personal devices, Danah Boyd argues that teens using social media really are being genuinely social, and that they are essentially using social media as a means of connecting in ways that previous generations of teens would have done in common public areas. (Boyd, 2014)  If this is true, then maybe social media provides a means of greater student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction online than many of the so-called interactive activities.

Maybe social media is worth a second look as a learning tool. I still value the face-to-face time with students in my classroom and will not be substituting internet for physical presence anytime soon. But if technology, and even social media, functions as a tool of engagement then I am at least interested in pursuing them as options for teaching and learning.

 

Boyd, D. (2014). It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press

Neff, L. S. (n.d.). Lev Vygotsky and Social Learning Theories. Retrieved August 10, 2016, from https://jan.ucc.nau.edu/lsn/educator/edtech/learningtheorieswebsite/vygotsky.htm

Staff Writers. (2011, July 14). Social Learning: An Introduction. Retrieved August 10, 2016, from http://www.onlinecollege.org/2011/07/14/social-learning-an-introduction/