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In a recent Forbes column, I discussed an Economist/Pearson study that found that culture, not income, was the primary driver of global academic achievement, regardless of country, gender or ethnicity. A frequent question I received on the piece was, “How do we create a culture of academic achievement where there is concerted resistance to its existence?”
I had previously written about promising stick-based remedies -- such as No Pass, No Drive statutes -- but discovered little in the way of carrots. That is, until I reframed the inqiry. Maybe we can engender widespread desire for education by exposing recalcitrant learners to proactive learners outside their normal milieu.
Enter “social media networks for education,” or “Safe Social Learning” (SSL). The premise of an SSL is that learning is inherently social and that kids, regardless of background, relish the chance to come together in social learning situations. According to a National School Boards Association study, 59% of students with access to the Internet report that they use social networking sites to discuss educational topics and 50% use the sites to talk about school assignments.
The challenge heretofore has been how to create a structured social learning environment that is safe, secure and effective. One publicly, if lightly, traded SSL company, ePals (TSXV:SLN), might have an answer. Originally founded and funded in 2003 as a nonprofit by several former AOL execs -- including Miles Gilburne, Steve Case and Ted Leonsis -- ePals builds cultural understanding across borders through online learning communities.
According to Chairman and CEO Gilburne -- whom I interviewed at the recent Education innovation Summit in Scottsdale -- "the ePals Global Community is based on a set of patent-pending, rule-based permissions and policy management technologies that give schools and teachers the ability to create multiple learning experiences, as well as manage -- not just control -- what students see and with whom they engage through the platform."
Or, in layman's terms, say you are a science teacher in Phoenix and you want your students to learn how a country on the front lines of global warming – say, Iceland -- is dealing with the issue. You send out a project request to teachers and classrooms via the ePals platform, and suddenly you have classrooms around the world – not just in Iceland -- wanting to engage in a collaborative project.
It’s like “Google+ on steroids,” says Gilburne, in that teachers can slice and dice their classes into several work groups, and invite in classrooms from several different countries simultaneously. Adds Ted Brodheim, former New York Board of Ed CTO, and now President of ePals@School, “the same project you would have done in an isolated classroom becomes much more interesting because you’ve added the elements of literacy and global citizenship.”
Other companies in educational social networking include Edmodo, Schoology and Gaggle. Edmodo is considered the “Facebook of education" because it virtually inserts itself into most arenas of teacher, student, administration, and parent interaction. In addition to offering a relatively secure place to connect with other classrooms, Edmodo enables students and parents to easily access homework and grades, and has sundry resource apps for teachers. However, Edmodo has recently been in the news -- and in the cross-hairs of online privacy groups -- for reportedly providing only optional SSL-encryption of student names and emails.
Schoology is a customizable "learning management system" aimed at teachers, principals and superintendents looking to share resources and insights, and manage information flow. Gaggle primarily provides safe email for students and teachers from any location or device, but without a global community behind it.
EPals is appreciably different than these educational social networking companies in that it is primarily focused on creating communities, cultural exchange and content that transcends geographic and linguistic borders. To that end, ePals has outposts in China (via a joint venture with NeuPals) and Europe, with forthcoming tools that enable teachers and students to collaborate in their native languages. Moreover, ePals’ Truste-certified SchoolSafe™ free email not only has embedded language translation, but it enables teachers and parents to monitor student cross-cultural communications before they are sent to make sure they are safe and age-appropriate (even though ePals, like Edmodo, does not SSL-encrypt all communications).
Finally, ePals bills itself as a “media company" -- a novel concept in the ed space -- by building “learning communities” around, say, McGraw-Hill’s Social Studies content or the Smithsonian’s Invent It! Challenge. In turn, ePals’ licenses its platform, other proprietary tech, and content created on its platform. For instance, Tools 4 School™ allows ePals teachers to license their lesson plans across the network.
It's, thus, no surprise that ePals, like other media distribution platforms -- think Netflix and, yes, the late AOL Digital Cities -- is buying original, or what Gilburne terms “disaggregated," content. For example, in late 2011, ePals purchased Carus Publishing – now called ePals Media – which offers content from a range of books and magazines, including popular children’s media brands such as Cricket® and Cobblestone®.
According to the NEA Report, Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global Society, the skills that come with global cultural understanding – including knowledge of foreign languages, geography, music, art, and social mores – are critical to a person’s and a nation’s academic success. However, as the PISA tests make clear, American students are falling behind their global peers in standard measures of content mastery. According to the most recent PISA results, American students ranked 30th in math, 23rd in science and 17th in reading. While PISA does not test what the NEA dubs the “four C’s” of “critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity" -- and while there is not yet empirical studies on how cultural exchange affects test performance -- common sense suggests that regular interaction with a diverse array of engaged foreign students should engender better learning outcomes.
This is particularly true with foreign language proficiency, which the Center for Applied Linguistics found to be strongly correlated with improved cognitive and academic ability, as well as global economic competitiveness. Australia, for instance, is mandating that all students learn Mandarin. An SSL like ePals could be the conduit, connecting English-speaking, Mandarin-learning Australian classrooms with Mandarin-speaking, English-learning Chinese classrooms.
However, there is a flaw in such techno-utopian projections, notes former Assistant Secretary of Education, Christina Erland Culver, via email:
"Cultural IQ creates relevance for students and captures their imagination as to how the world fits together into 'global understanding,' but nothing can replace the critically important skills of reading, writing, mathematics, and science without actually doing it. Epals, Edomodo and other SSLs are about creating access to a world of information in a common shared area. However, access can't get academic results on its own. It’s how it is applied through great teaching. Watching videos of space with an ePal in China might be inspiring, but it doesn’t make you an astrophysicist. Connectedness, while cool, and forever present here forward, does not match the simple hard work, rigor and grit that must go into acquiring knowledge through actual reading, writing, and computation."
While social learning exchanges with students from nations with a culture of academic excellence is by no means the surefire antidote to America's mediocre global test scores, it is, nevertheless, easy to see why SSLs show promise, especially in improving the soft skills that the NEA has identified. Where high-speed broadband access is consistent, free SSLs prove that there is no longer an excuse for global cultural ignorance, regardless of income, race or geography. Moreover, as dramatically more Americans get passports and travel abroad, surely any platform that fosters greater global understanding is mission critical for success in our richly interconnected world.
Let me know what you think in the comment area below. And feel free to track me on Twitter and follow me on Forbes to receive dispatches from the front lines of global education. Finally, please visit JamesCrotty.com for links to my books, magazines, and other creative work, including my forthcoming documentary on the urban dropout epidemic, Crotty's Kids.
