Interview with Liz Kolb, author of "Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education in and out of the Classroom"
Announcer: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, a weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials, and individuals who are passionate about the future of Michigan Education. Now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education. This week we are joined in the Foxbright Podcast Studio by Liz Kolb. Liz Kolb is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Madonna University in Livonia, Michigan. She is also completing her PhD in Learning Technologies at the University of Michigan. Liz taught high school and middle school social studies at Cincinnati, Ohio. She also spent four years as a high school technology coordinator and teacher. Liz is the author of a new book titled Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cellphones to Education in and out of the classroom. Welcome Liz, it's great to have you on the show.
Liz Kolb: Oh, thank you Rob. It's good to be here.
Rob Huisingh: Liz, one of the early concepts that you talk about in the very first part of book, in fact, I think it's the first paragraph is that you talk about the "Digital Disconnect" and that's for today's students. Can you help understand of what is the digital disconnect and why is that something that we should be thinking about?
Liz Kolb: Well, the digital disconnect that I talk about in the book is that our students at home in their everyday lives are using all sorts of different technologies. They are using cellphones, they are using video games, they are using social networking devices, instant messaging as just part of their everyday communication and collaboration with the world and with the people around them.
They see them as a very social thing, they don't see them as a learning or an educative thing. But in the classrooms, we are really ignoring those particular tools and what's happening is in the classroom, they are receiving the message that these tools are social, they are not for learning, they have no professional function in the world.
But these are the students of the next generation. They are the ones who are going to be the new educators and the new leaders of this world and if that's the way that they are communicating and collaborating with the world and they are getting the message that these are not the proper tools to be using, then I think we are doing them a disservice because they are going in the classroom using more traditional tools and resources and then they are going home using these new digital devices. This disconnect, I think we can create connections between in simply by bringing some of these tools that the students have into the classroom.
So bringing in video games or in my particular book, I focus on cellphones and ways that we can bring a basic cellphone into the classroom or into learning, not necessarily directly into the classroom and show students how they can turn their social toy into a learning tool that can be helpful for their future professional lives.
Rob Huisingh: Now you quote a 2006 study which claim that some 47% of teachers think that it's okay for students to have cellphones in school, but really for emergency purposes only. Then more than 25% of teachers do not believe cellphones belong on a school campus at all. Would you agree that about half of our teachers today would see the premise of your book as somewhat counterintuitive?
Liz Kolb: I think so. I think that the title and concept of my book may turn off many educators and administrators just by that particular concept. But what I have found is that it's more that the media has really put out this message that cellphones are harmful or they are not helpful in education. What I think we need to do and the purpose of writing this book was to give another perspective on cellphones themselves that cellphones can actually be learning tools and they can be tools that are very helpful for classroom learning and for the students themselves.
So the goal of the book was to take these educators and administrators who are in more of that mindset and that's probably the majority of educators right now and to give them a new perspective. So I am not trying to tell them everybody should be using cellphones everyday but here's another perspective on cellphones that you may not be hearing from the media and here's lots of ideas of how to use them as learning tools.
Rob Huisingh: You mentioned the Kaiser Family Foundation study in 2005 named Today's Youth as the multitasking generation, the M generation. Those of us who are not part of the M generation, I think we value singularity of focus in interpersonal communications and that this touches on digital etiquette and there does seem to be somewhat of a disconnect or a generational divide between the M generation and the generation that I would say that I belong to. Can you talk about that?
Liz Kolb: Sure. I am personally in my 30s now and I am not somebody who used cellphones growing up. We didn't even have them, we didn't even have e-mail. When I was in high school, we were working with DOS.
So I am not part of this M generation myself. I think that's part of the disconnect that we are seeing is that most educators do not grow up with this idea of using technology tools and multi-tasking with them and that's what the M generation means really is that students are not just talking on the cellphone or they're not just working on a computer and doing their homework. They are doing all of this at one time. They are able to multi-task and do it successfully and save time in their lives whereas people of my generation and older are used to doing one thing a time.
I think that, that makes it harder for teachers and educators to kind of jump on the bandwagon. Well, maybe we should try multitasking or maybe we should try cellphones or instant messaging in schools because it's not something we're comfortable with ourselves and we have to learn to become comfortable with it and may be give a little bit of that, I guess you can say power over to the students and let them teach us a little bit about what they're doing outside of schools and find ways to make that educative and connect it with content learning.
Rob Huisingh: Just to sort of bring my own personal history and personal family life into this and maybe I shouldn't do that, last night I was watching as my son was on the computer and he was writing a paper for AP English and these boxes kept popping up on the screen with his instant messaging from his friends. To me, that seemed as though that was very annoying, distracting. How could you possibly be thinking at a strategic level about this AP English paper and at the same time engaging in this conversation with perhaps two or three different people? They don't seem to think there's anything wrong with it.
Liz Kolb: No. They don't and for them what the Kaiser Foundation study has found and other studies are finding is that it's not hurting them. I think there is a belief that well, if you are instant messaging and doing your homework, it is actually hurting your learning process or you're not thinking enough about the content, you are focused more on what your friends are doing. But they are able to work between those two realms as you can say and still put together a successful piece of content learning.
The other piece of that is that they are often when they are talking back and forth with their friends at times they are often collaborating about the work that they are doing. So learning has now become from one to many.
So it's no longer just about one person writing a report, it's about many people putting their minds together and collaborating on a report which is part of this whole new generation. It's not one piece of knowledge. It's many people coming together to put together a piece of knowledge.
Rob Huisingh: In the fourth chapter of your book you talk about using cellphones to create instant audio files. I was amazed because here we are working on a podcast here but you were talking about this ability and one of the areas was to create almost instant podcast using a cellphone. Would you mind telling our listeners a little bit about these applications and how they can be used to facilitate learning?
Liz Kolb: Sure. Actually, that's really the reason why I jumped on this bandwagon. I am not somebody who is set out to write a book. I am somebody who was an educator, a technology coordinator and I used to write the policies against having cellphones in schools. I was very anti-cellphones in schools for many years because I thought they were harmful and distracting and I couldn't see any usefulness out of them.
When I was blogging with my teachers a few years ago, it was about three years ago now, we were doing a few activities and a message popped up and it said, audio blog from your cellphone. I thought what is that? I didn't even know what that was. So I was curious and I pulled out my cellphone. It was just a basic cellphone that came with the package and I called this number and said something that was a little bit incoherent and as soon as I hung up, it immediately posted as an MP3 file right onto my blog that I had.
I thought wow! That was the easiest podcast I have ever made. It had an RSS feed. It was a downloadable file and so many teachers who are interested in things like podcasting especially three years ago, but even now will find it cumbersome to learn how to even use special software like Audacity or GarageBand and using iPods and microphones.
It's not always an easy thing for most teachers to do. The teachers that I've done the cellphone podcasting with find it very simple, basic. You just call up a number and then immediately you can have a podcast posted just about anywhere on the internet and there's a lot of great free services that I talk about in the book that allow you to do this.
So it's a very simple procedure and that's really when I started thinking about how could I use this with teachers and we came up with all sorts of ways that they could use it. Interviewing, oral histories, doing things like radio theaters which I worked with a teacher in Trenton who did that in her school district which is a really great project for her students and the nice thing is the students always have it with them especially secondary students. We know about 80% of them have a cellphone.
Anytime they can document an interview or an oral history or just even kind of a mental note or do their weekly class podcast from home or from anywhere else.
Rob Huisingh: I hope you would agree that when I say I found your book to read very much like a How-To manual. The chapters are presented topically based, they're explained. The concepts are brought forward and then there are actually activity plans as far as here's three or four activity plans which you can do right in your classroom. I found it to be very interesting.
Liz Kolb: Thanks. The reason why I wrote the book was because when I found out about the cellphone podcasting, I wanted to know what else I could do with the cellphone, I became very curious and at that point my cellphone had really turned into a learning tool and I looked around on the internet, I looked through books, through all sorts of resources that I was aware of and I could not find any resources that talked about ways to use a cellphone in an educative learning manner with students.
So that's when I just started to research myself on different ways I could use it and slowly overtime I found lots of great web resources that cellphones can couple with to create things like photo blogs or location blogging where I can actually take a picture from a location and have it immediately post on a map online.
So when I set out to write the book, I really wanted it to be for teachers, for administrators who had never done this kind of thing before and say take a basic cellphone, not a fancy iPhone or a smart phone but a basic cellphone and here's just a variety or activities you can do with it and different ways that you can really help the students see that it's a learning tool.
Rob Huisingh: Certainly not making a political endorsement here, but Barack Obama was in town the other day and I happened to go see him and while I was there, John Edwards came out on the stand and endorsed Barack Obama at that time. This was breaking news and afterwards, when I was on my way home, I was talking to some people and they said well, why on earth didn't you Twitter us and I thought, you know I didn't even think about it, but using Twitter to type in a short text message saying John Edwards just endorsed Barack Obama and then putting that out on Twitter. I have a Twitter account. I use it, but it never occurred to me and really it is all about this instantaneous connectivity that we're seeing today. It's quite amazing.
Liz Kolb: It is and that's funny you mentioned the rally because I went to the same Barack Obama rally and at the time I remember there was kind of the rumor going around is John Edwards is going to endorse Barack Obama and so there's a great free resource you can use on your cellphone called ChaCha, it's chacha.com and all you have to do is call the number, ask any question you want and then they will text message you back the answer.
So I called and said, is John Edwards is going to endorse Barack Obama tonight and within a minute I got an answer back with the link to the CNN site where they said, yes he is going to endorse and here's the little news blurb on it and I sent my cellphone around the aisle so people could read that and it was great to be able to get that quick instant message and it's nice that I know how to use my cellphone as more of a research tool and a knowledge gathering tool like that.
Rob Huisingh: I am assuming because this is an evolving technology, this is that I could see book two, book three on the horizon. Do you have any plans?
Liz Kolb: Well, ISTE are the editors for the book and they have mentioned another edition. I've been thinking more about doing more workbook supplements with it because I think there are so many new resources that couple with cellphones online that are showing up on a weekly basis that I would like to keep current on that and keep teachers current on new resources they can use. So I think may be instead of books, it might be more workbooks that I follow up on.
Rob Huisingh: Now Liz, how can people get a hold of your book? How can they -- where can they get it?
Liz Kolb: I am glad you asked. It's published by ISTE, so you can go to www.iste.org/bookstore and right now, it is set to be published for October. So you can pre-order it now, but you won't be able to get it until October at the moment. If you want more information about it, you can also go to my website which is cellphonesinlearning.com.
Rob Huisingh: cellphonesinlearning.com. Well, Liz I want to thank you for taking time to be with us. It is a fascinating subject and I have to say it is somewhat counterintuitive just like last night seeing my son working on a paper and instant messaging back and forth. My initial reaction was, stop, don't do that and then kind of it shows instead to ask him the question, do you find that distracting? Not at all, dad. So thank you very much for being here. I appreciate to you taking the time.
Liz Kolb: Oh, thank you for having me and I am glad to be able to get another perspective out there on cellphones in the classroom.
Rob Huisingh: If you want to contact Liz Kolb, she can be called and she can be reached by e-mail at elikeren@umich.edu. Until next week, this is Rob Huisingh with Inside Michigan Education.
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