However, two reports stand-out because of the expertise, research and experience that have been harnessed in order to compile these in-depth reports. The first is a business report from Deloitte called Technology, Media & Telecommunications Predictions 2012 which is extensive, comprehensive and solidly backed by evidence to give a view of what is predicted for the coming year. Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Predictions is in its third year and can boast a good record of predictive accuracy.

What is intriguing from an educational perspective is that many of the predictions are very likely to have a significant impact on education. For example, the use of evidence which has been extracted from collections of ‘big data’ in order to plan; the extensive use of mobile devices by people who have more than one such device eg smartphone and tablet, and their use of cloud applications; the increase in the use of local wireless connectivity bypassing the internet; the pervasiveness of social networking and the massive array of available apps of which so few will be used; and the rise of 3D printing. Educational institutions considering the use of personal devices owned by students as part of a bring your own device (BYOD) strategy may well face carrier and data limitations as well as electronic books and articles that escalate in cost.

TMT Predictions 2012 is an excellent and well researched report which is worth every minute reading. Education and training planners, ICT coordinators and education leaders would be hard pressed to find a more extensive and thorough report about the coming year in relation to the use of technology and digital media.

The second document is the result of the considerations of 100 experts gathered together in January 2012 by the New Media Consortium (NMC) as part of the Horizons project. The two-page document titled A Communique from the Horizon Project Retreat is an initial summary report from the collective wisdom of the group about the role of technology in education for the coming decade. Further information as it is compiled will be placed on The Future of Education wiki. The expertise and experience assembled by NMC was impressive and their communique was confronting for education because of the underlying theme that can only be summarised as a make-over for education that is about to happen. Consider the rise of informal learning; open content, open data and open resources having value and the increased use of videos and rich media; rethinking literacy; new business models across the education ecosystem and an expectation to learn and work collaboratively. These challenges will require intensive research and careful planning by educational leaders.

The influential philosopher, education thinker, prolific writer and commentator Stephen Downes has often suggested that the students own education. Perhaps the way that will take shape will continue apace in 2012.

We hope that the reviews of educational research into the use of digital technologies and media have been useful for you and your colleagues.

DERN research reviews will recommence in February 2012.

The DERN team

Culture, Communication and Change: Reflections on the use and impact of modern media and technology in our lives is a fascinating read and a reminder of a wider overall picture of digital use than education. Culture, Communication and Change: Reflections is the report of part of a global project from the University of Cambridge.

Culture, Communication and Change: Reflections on the use and impact of modern media and technology in our lives summarises the reflections of twelve leading thinkers and experts of the use of digital technologies. Their reflections are written in a beautifully succinct style which allows the reader to build a picture of some impacts from a range of expert opinions. Issues that have been reported in the research literature such as the distractability of digital technologies and services, attention to educational quality within a vast quantity of available information and well-being are addressed from a deep perspective of experience and research. As Mitch Resnick asserts, ‘Class-time should belong to active learning, where students are actively engaged in exploring, experimenting and expressing themselves' (p. 28). He goes further and adds that placing lectures online when they could be delivered in person reinforces the passive delivery of information whereas ‘the best learning experiences involve more than delivery of information’ (p. 28).

Notions of equity and the digital divide, as well as new concepts for the design of educational experiences using digital technologies and media, confront educational leaders today. Explorations of neuroscience to explain the impact of digital technologies on the way that we think and the possibilities of change in our social lives, as a result of using digital technologies, are discussed in an historical and scholarly context.

Culture, Communication and Change: Reflections on the use and impact of modern media and technology in our lives is a document that is very rewarding. If you have the chance for a quiet read and reflection on the use of digital technologies and media, during the vacation period, then this should be at the top of your list.

A well written, at times lyrical, and pedagogically relevant study of the use of social networks to support classroom activities has been reported recently in IRRODL. Designing for Learning: Online Social Networks as a Classroom Environment focussed on ‘notions of emergence, connections and designs for learning’ (p. 1) to understand ‘students’ interactions when using online social media as a learning environment’ (p. 1) with 150 students organised in seven classes in a Victorian secondary school.

The use of the social networking service Ning enabled the students in the study to write and publish in their own voices for a community far wider than the confines of a classroom. Using pseudonyms or avatars, the students ‘were able to be explorers, designers, and publishers, and this encouraged them to support their peers, self-reflect, and provide both peer-assessment and self-assessment’ (p. 6). Instead of the teacher being the only person to review or peruse a student’s work, other students were able to comment, share their opinions with one  another and value other students' work. In fact, stated the teacher who was the researcher, ‘students started to value the opinions of their peers, and at times, were very critical of peer work that contained little thought or effort or was simply cut-and-pasted from the internet’ (p.8). Students who participated in the social networking learning environment did so for a number of reasons including ‘to promote their own ideas and interests, increase their own popularity, or present themselves as knowledgeable. Some students also used the Ning to air their frustrations and feelings’ (p. 10). The students, who were able to remain anonymous, became confident, valued and creative online and were encouraged by peer feedback to produce higher quality work. Interestingly, the study reported that, ‘for each of the seven face-to-face classes, the most vocal students rarely participated in on-line situations’ (p. 8).

The study Designing for Learning: Online Social Networks as a Classroom Environment highlighted the necessity for the teacher to allow a degree of flexibility and unpredictableness to occur in student responses and actions, or at times to approach chaos. Teaching, it has been argued by some writers, seeks to maintain traditions of order that can be seen as almost coercive, nowadays. However, too much chaos can lead to disruption whereas reorganising thinking and learning do require a degree of chaos and complexity. This study neatly demonstrated the dynamics of self-renewal and self-organisation which are both essential for operating successfully in an online learning environment.

Working online with students does change the way that teachers operate. Designing for Learning: Online Social Networks as a Classroom Environment reported that the time required to monitor and respond to students online plus the diversity of actions by the students meant that the formal curriculum content was difficult to complete. The need for the teacher to systematically support the students to be positive and objective online, so that peer critiques were helpful and occurred in a trusted space, were important. Sensitivity and being constructive were skills that were needed to be taught and monitored when students provided feedback online. However, the researcher found that there was some teacher time gained in relation to marking and correcting students’ work ‘by implementing peer- and self-assessment with students and using her classroom observations’ (p. 20).

The gain in using online social networking as a classroom environment enabled interactions during the learning process so that students became aware of their own communication. The social networking environment diversified the students’ networks, opened new possibilities for learning and gave the students a voice in their own learning process.

This is a study well worth reading and thinking about because it focusses on teaching and learning. It demonstrates clearly that the use of social networking can be used successfully in the processes of learning. Designing for Learning: Online Social Networks as a Classroom Environment provides a model for schools to consider as a starting point for using social networking in pedagogy. The study also provides an exemplar for other researchers to use in studying the use of digital technologies as a part of pedagogy in other curriculum areas such as the arts, maths, science, language, and so on.

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) has considered the issue of how to visualise the use of the interactive internet globally. The OII has now been in operation for ten years and is a widely respected and a prolific publisher of research and papers about the use of the internet. The possibility of a global information architecture that includes education and research may begin to emerge as the semantic web, that is, the capacity to link to large interactive databases of information, grows.

The maps and visualisations of big data produced by OII show how ‘Cyberspace is characterised by highly uneven geographies, reinforcing the global patterns of visibility, representation and voice that we’re used to in the offline world’ (Margetts, 2011). Profesor Helen Margetts, recently appointed Director of OII, stated that these visualisations are ‘incredibly popular and high impact’. Data visualisation maps of literacy and gender, internet use, online newspapers, academic knowledge, Flickr, Wikipedia and more can be seen at http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis. Each map can be examined further to understand how the data were collected and the findings from the visualisations.

These data are particularly important for educators and educational planners to understand because access to information and communication is being restructured globally, even though it is happening unevenly. Advanced economies including Australia are becoming more and more dependent on the use of global communications including the internet especially for learning and teaching. However, Kennedy et al. (2009) found that there was a great diversity of internet use, experience and expertise among students entering university and that popular assumptions about students being expert users of the internet were false. Given that education activities are the most common use of the internet by students between the ages of 9 and 16, and the fact that internet use and access is growing, then the reasons for teaching students of all ages how to best use the internet safely for research, projects, learning, collaborating, producing and creating are increasing.

The case for teaching learners how to use the internet in education and for teaching and learning is becoming more urgent.

Margetts, H. (2011). OII News [2011.11.15]: Big Data, 1+1 Programme, SDP2012, Events, Webcasts. Mailing list at http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/mailinglist/.

The recently published Innovative Teaching and Learning (ITL) Research: 2011 Findings and Implications research undertaken in seven countries (Finland, Indonesia, Russia, Senegal, England, Mexico and Australia) was focussed on the question of educational renewal. This detailed research included 159 schools with 4,038 teacher and 159 Principal online surveys; 24 school site visits involving teacher interviews (86), teacher observations (81), school leader interviews (18) and student focus groups (33). These data gathering activities were complemented by an analysis of a number of teacher-prepared learning activities (967) and range of student work samples (3,367). The schools in this multinational research collaboration were spread evenly across the seven countries (24 in each) and a mixture of innovative and traditional schools were selected.

The findings of the ITL Research are soundly based and refreshingly insightful. For example, the report found that teachers were the major determinants of innovative learning through the learning activities that they designed for their students and that ‘the characteristics of an assigned learning activity strongly predicted the skills demonstrated in student work’ (p. 17). Innovative learning activities provide strong support for learning 21^st century skills although such activities are ‘still the exception rather than the rule’ (p. 18). ‘Innovation is a teacher-level phenomenon’ (p. 18), states the report. However, innovative learning activities using ICT are not also widespread but are isolated practices (p. 20).

The report found that students’ use of ICT in learning activities was basic eg finding information, practicing routine skills and taking tests, which is not surprising given that OECD (2009) reported that students were unable to always use ICT for more than one or two hours per week at school. The variation of innovation and student ICT use in learning activities within a school was greater than the variation between schools which is somewhat similar to the variations in student performance that Hattie (2009) reported.

‘Innovative teaching happens more in environments where teachers collaborate’ (p. 21), the research found and ‘collaboration relies on a supportive culture, alignment of incentives, and times built into teachers’ schedules during which collaboration can take place’ (p. 21). Leadership also is clearly important in establishing a collaborative teaching culture but ‘innovative teaching that leverages ICT happens more when students have access [to ICT] in their classrooms’ (p. 23). Although teacher access is important, student access to ICT is more so, in order to benefit learning, otherwise the risk of students being the passive recipients of information endures.

The research is followed by a reflection on innovation and the use of ICT in education as well as a commentary describing some aspects of the experience of systemic change in education in Ontario, Canada. However, although interesting, there is a need to consider the reflection and commentary carefully because they are contextually bound in a specific culture where the status of education and societal expectations of student achievement may vary. Aptly though, the reflection on ICT use in teaching and learning emphasised the importance of teacher professional learning which was structured into the Ontario education system.

ILT research findings is a very thorough and deep piece of research that relates teacher pedagogical activities to student outcomes. It deserves thorough examination and discussion among teachers and educational leaders because embedded in the research findings and its following commentary, there are some very sound strategies for school improvement using ICT in learning.

References

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning. A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Oxon: Routledge,

OECD. (2009). Is technology use related to educational performance? Evidence from PISA. Paris: OECD Publishing.

The Australian report of a survey of children and their parents titled Risks and safety for Australian children on the internet: Full findings from the AU Kids Online survey of 9-16 year olds and their parents documented by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and accessible through Australian Policy Online, detailed the initial findings from the survey and interviews of 400 children and one of their parents/carers, over the period Nov/Feb 2010-2011.

Australian 9-16 year old children are frequent internet users (96%) and access the internet through mobile devices (60%) more so than children in most other countries. They go online almost daily (76%) and do so at home and school, at a friend’s place (70%), in their bedrooms (56% girls and 38% boys) and ‘out and about’ (31%) (p. 7). Australian children go online for an average of 99 minutes per day and an increasing proportion (37%) have more than basic skills being able to bookmark websites, find safety information, block message and apply filters. However, more than half of the children suggested that they spent too much time on the internet and needed to spend more of their time with family and friends.

Consistent with research by other Australian bodies the top activity for Australian children using the internet is for schoolwork and educational activities (86%). Other internet activities include’ watching videos (85%), playing games (78%), emailing (67%) and social networking (63%)’ (p. 8) but ‘almost half of the cohort (45%) actively contribute their own media and distribute it to friends and family’ (p. 8).

Social networking sites are very popular with 65% of children having their own social networking site (SNS) profiles. Interestingly, the use of SNS profiles would appear to coincide with the start of secondary schooling, in the populous Australian states. Australian students have substantially more SNS contacts than European children (>50) and often find discussing issues about themselves easier online than face to face.

Parent mediation in Australia is common using methods such as discussing online activities (67%), monitoring and tracking, stipulating rules for internet use, staying nearby and applying restrictions. However, children reported that they received safety advice from teachers (83%), parents (75%) and their peers (32%), while ‘52% [said] that they also provided such advice’ (p. 10).

Increased internet use would appear to also increase online risk experiences with ‘30% of Australian children say[ing] that they have been bothered or upset by something online in the past year’ (p. 9). The online risks that were reported included children experiencing sexual images, bullying, sexual messages and engaging with people whom they had not met face to face. However, the differences between possible risks and actual harm or hurt that were made explicit in the report indicated that nasty or hurtful messages could be damaging to children. The report came to the conclusion that ‘Australia children are disproportionately likely to go online using a smart handheld device and it may be less likely to be effectively mediated by parents and others’ (p. 67).

This detailed and thorough report Risks and safety for Australian children on the internet: Full findings from the AU Kids Online survey of 9-16 year olds and their parents provides a sound basis for international comparisons of internet use by Australian children, the online risks that they may experience and the safety advice and support they receive from teachers, parents and peers. However, as the European studies of children's internet use has demonstrated, the ‘opportunities and risks go hand in hand’ (p. 59). That statement of opportunities and risks has now been demonstrated further, in the Australian context, by this exceptional Australian report.

The new study by Common Sense Media called Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America which can be assumed to mean in the United States of America, contains a number of surprising findings. ‘A survey of 1,384 parents of children age 0 to 8 years old’ (p. 15) was completed and analysed. Respondents without access to digital technology were provided with a computer by the researchers to ensure a more comprehensive response across income levels. The report refers to digital media meaning ‘console video games, computers, cell phones, handheld video game players, video iPods and iPads and other tablet devices’ (p. 15) and mobile media meaning ‘cell phones, video iPods, and iPads and other tablet devices’ (p. 15) for the purposes of the survey.

The survey set out to answer a range of questions about the time that children spent watching screens, access to new media platforms, the children’s ages, popular educational media, demographic differences (gender, race, socio-economic status), TV viewing and the media environment in children’s homes, including devices in the bedroom.

The survey found that young children were frequent users of digital screen media. More than ‘half (52%) of all children now have access to one of the newer mobile devices at home: either a smartphone (41%), a video iPod (21%), or an iPad or other tablet device (8%)’ (p. 9) and parents (29%) download apps for their children, many of whom use mobile devices daily. The regular use of computers is more prolific with 53% of 2 to 4 years olds using computers and 90% of 5 to 8 year olds. Console video games (51%) are also popular although TV remains dominant.

However, home computer access varies between low income families (48%) and high-income families (91%) as does smartphone downloaded apps for the children: 14% and 47% respectively. ‘There continues to be a substantial digital divide, including both computers and mobile devices’ (p. 10) states the report.

The use of TV with babies and toddlers between 0 and 1 year of age remains the dominant screen technology with 43% of babies and toddlers watching TV or DVDs for an average of nearly two hours a day, with nearly one-third of them having a TV in their bedroom. Nearly two-thirds of children 0 to 8 years of age watch 1 hour-44 minutes of television per day and 42% have a TV in their bedroom. In a proportion of homes (39%), the TV is left on all or most of the time ‘whether anyone is watching it or not’ (p. 11). ‘Broadcast television is the most accessible and widely used platform for educational content among lower-income children’ (p. 12). There are clear differences between race and economic status, but not so much by gender although boys are more likely to play console video games than girls. However, an important finding is that ‘children from higher-income families or with more educated parents spend less time with media than other children do’ (p. 12) with ‘twenty percent of children in upper income homes [having] a TV in their bedroom , compared to 64% of those from lower-income homes’ (p. 12).

Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America is a very useful report for early childhood educators because it includes a number of data tables for each of the factors that have been analysed. These tables enable the reader to gain a targeted granular view of the responses about the use of screen media with young children.

Questions about the effects of digital screen use on young children arise from the data as do questions about learning, equity, health and nurturing. This report is a welcome addition to research on the use of digital media with young children and emphasises the need for further detailed research to assist parents and educators.

Although one can understand the concern among librarians about the increased popularity of Google and Wikipedia, the differences may be quite stark. For instance, the expertise that librarians utilise for deep searching does not seem likely when searching online. In a recently published article of an exploratory investigation into the queries and search terms used in a large library and on Google and Wikipedia, the results demonstrated a number of differences. Searching where for what: A comparison of use of the library catalogue, Google and Wikipedia published in the open online journal Library and Information Research is revealing.

Researchers analysed a sample of 1760 search terms at the State Library of Victoria (SLV) for the catalogue, Google and Wikipedia. The analysis of general search terms over one month, as distinct from specific search terms for books and authors which amounted to over 25% of searches, and in collaboration with a web analytics company, coded and categorised searches into 15 main groupings. When the results were tabled those groupings with very small numbers of search terms were combined into a category labelled as ‘other’.

Search queries for Google were considered either informational, navigational or transactional although this did require some judgement based on the intention of the query. The analysis had some limitations in that ‘the distribution of subjects looked up in Google and Wikipedia [was] not an indication of subjects looked up on the internet’ (p. 72). However, using the ‘transaction logs for investigating the sort of information people access online’ (p. 72) was both unobtrusive and did not affect user behaviour.

The researchers found that there were important qualitative differences between the library and online services even though Google's use was 700 times more and Wikipedia's use was 100 greater. Search engine users did not go past the first page of results (62%) and meaning, accuracy, bibliographic details and editorial responsibility may not have been present or authentic in the online search results. However, more importantly, users did go to different informational resources for different topics. ‘Two-thirds of the queries that led to Wikipedia related to popular culture and half of the informational queries on Google related to popular culture or ecommerce’ (p. 77) stated the report. Library users, on the other hand, sought information on contemporary issues from the catalogue but much less so from Google or Wikipedia.

Although the number of searches on Google and those that lead to Wikipedia are of a much higher magnitude, Searching where for what: A comparison of use of the library catalogue, Google and Wikipedia has demonstrated that the library catalogue was used for different purposes. However, the need to provide guidance, quality and expertise in a networked world of ever increasing access to information sources has never been more important.

A thought provoking research article Paradox, Promise and Public Pedagogy: Implications of the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution published earlier in 2011 in the Australian Journal of Teacher Education is definitely worth reading and gives pause for thought even though some assertions may be contentious. Paradox, Promise and Public Pedagogy raises three issues about the use of computers in schools: the digital natives rhetoric, public pedagogy and the corporatisation of education.

Leaning as it does on social justice writers, Paradox, Promise and Public Pedagogy explores the commonly held notion of students as so called ‘digital natives’ and debunks the idea because of a lack of empirical evidence. In fact, suggests the author, ‘there is little consensus as to who the digital natives are’ and ‘within the Australian context … research does not support the claims being made' (p. 71). In fact, states Paradox, Promise and Public Pedagogy ‘most use of ICTs … is [by] professional adults and the highest usage of the internet is among 35-44 year olds’ (p. 72). The misconception that students are so called digital natives ‘undermines teacher confidence in their ability to impart knowledge’ (p. 72).

Although education was established for vocational, intellectual and personal purposes, the concern of Paradox, Promise and Public Pedagogy is the corporatisation of education in which computers, the internet, text books and school supplies all play a part. However, as the costs of education escalate and ‘the influence of globalisation upon education’ (p. 67) grows, ‘choice, competition, performance and individual responsibility’ (p. 68) are emphasised and the DER seeks to address the ‘computer to student ratio’ (p. 69) in order to up-skill human capital. This is one option for thought but perhaps there are also other options that may run deeper, at least George Siemens, originator of the learning theory, connectivism, thinks so.

The paper explores the concept of a ‘public pedagogy’ where ‘education, schooling and pedagogy have become synonymous in the public mind’ (p. 73). Public pedagogy, the article alleges, can lead to the values and practices of consumerism, as opposed to education. Paradox, Promise and Public Pedagogy argues that education and technology can be used to teach and learn critical thinking, in order to ‘counter the mis-education being perpetuated by corporate public pedagogy’ (p. 73). As Sutherland-Smith and Saltmarsh (2010) demonstrated, implementers of digital technologies in education need to be mindful of the educational purpose, the pedagogy and the practicalities.

Paradox, Promise and Public Pedagogy: Implications of the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution elegantly examines research about the use of computers and networks in education from a social justice perspective and highlights the processes of identity formation in social networking that is firmly grounded in students’ real life social connections (p. 72). However, in implementing social media in education, educational leaders have needed to be cautious in order that the appropriate infrastructure, including policy, is in place to maximise the safe use of the internet for teaching and learning.

Paradox, Promise and Public Pedagogy: Implications of the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution cogently raises a number of very relevant issues about the pedagogy of using digital technologies and media in education that need to be discussed and debated by educators, so that appropriate pedagogies can be realised.