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Twitter and Summer Learning
by Tonia Lovejoy

The other day I joined a Twitter discussion hosted by the Collaborative for Building After-School Systems (CBASS) on extending the school day. Prior to the chat, CBASS asked people to read the Wallace Foundation’s recent report “Reimagining the School Day: More Time for Learning”. It was exciting to see members of education organizations from around the United States weighing in on the issues that mattered to them most. Like Cliff Notes for a policy maker, the tweets displayed the spectrum of opinions and concerns in the education community surrounding extending school into the summer. 

We discussed expanded learning, and pondered whether its moment had arrived. Educators from groups like UNICEF and TASC cited startling statistics about the loss of learning that happens during summer vacations, particularly with students from lower economic backgrounds. Others focused on how summer programming could be structured to make the biggest impact on narrowing the achievement gap. Collectively, the participants agreed, summer programming needs to be experiential and innovative, and include parents, in order to truly make a difference with marginalized populations.

All the while, I kept thinking about a recent experience interviewing for a new hire. I had struggled to pinpoint a skill I was looking for in the interviewee. As an educator, I would call the skill global competence. Yet, in the workplace it was something more tangible to me. I wanted evidence that the person I hired would be personally motivated to leverage technology to do their job efficiently. This included a wide range of sub-skills that I couldn’t quite gauge from the job descriptions on the candidates' resumes alone. Sure, each person had indicated on their resume their proficiency with MS Word and Excel. Yet, the real indicator of their tech proficiency, I decided, was in how well the person was using technology in their personal life.  

The interviewees were all young and nervous, their new business outfits neatly pressed and tucked into place. “On a scale of 1 to 5,” I asked each potential new employee, “1 being a Luddite who opposes the use new technology, and 5 being a social media fanatic who tweets multiple times a day, where do you rate yourself?" The responses were perhaps not surprising. Of all the 20-something candidates, only one rated themselves as a 4. They rest rated themselves a 5 and, had unanimously inserted a disclaimer about not being obsessed with their smart phones to the degree of many of their friends.

It is hard not to be obsessed. 21^st Century Learning is fun and there are a lot of new tools, and toys, for us to play with today. Twitter - despite its name and the ridiculous verb that has come out of it (to tweet) – has the tremendous capacity to allow for a live, worldwide conversation. As each one explained, they use a variety of online software programs and websites to keep up on trends, news, and job opportunities. They search daily for better apps for sharing photos, new ways to customize their blog/s, and joined discussion groups to figure out how to embed music players, video players, ads and games using html code. I was right. These young college graduates demonstrated a seamless connection between their budding professional lives and their social lives by using tools that increased their ability to participate in real-time dialog with an informed opinion across a variety of subject areas. 

They did not learn to use social media in school, they learned it from the media and their peers, and they were embracing it based on its relative positive impact on their lives. They could distinguish between an obsessive use of technology and a healthy one, and it did not have to do with the amount of time spent online necessarily. This critical understanding set the candidates I interviewed apart from their peers. They knew how to express themselves in 140 characters or less, or at least weren't daunted by the prospect, suggesting that brevity may very well be the voice of reason in the future as it was in the past.  

If we are going to extend learning into the summer, then let the goal be to bridge the gap between the organic social learning that is occurring in the private and professional sector, and the traditional academic learning that is taking place during the school day. Once educators are able to fully use today’s technology with their students, which could happen more easily in summer programming (as it does now with afterschool programming), they will be in a better position to harness the natural drive that we each have to connect with each other. Then, students will be engaged in the learning that matters most - that which makes us feel more valuable to our community. If extending the school year into the summer doesn't entail a more open approach to online learning then we might as well multiply our education problems times 3 more months and countless more hours of educators wringing their hands and students begging to join the world, outside the classroom. 

About Tonia

Tonia Lovejoy is a returned Peace Corps Nepal volunteer, managing Reach the World from Brooklyn, New York since 2009. You can reach Tonia at tonia@reachtheworld.org.