Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother-- Another opportunity to teach parenting

The book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua is stirring an important discussion of the role of parents in their children's success.  Some of the controversy over this book was stirred up by the Wall Street Journal that titled an article, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior."    But the topics discussed by Ms. Chua raise important questions about parent expectations, discipline, peers, practice, and so forth. 

Here are some interesting discussions:  Huffington Post:  

Slate magazine is hosting a discussion of the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua on January 27th. 

Participating Online about Parenting

This cartoon which shows a gun with the word "parenting" as the safety switch was a major topic of discussion in my house this week.  It raised lots of questions. 

1.  Are parents to blame for gun violence?
2.  Are parents "responsible for gun violence"?
3.  What are our responsibilities about dealing with our adult children's positive or negative behaviors?
4.  What are the challenges of finding resources/supports for our adult children with difficulties?
5.  What are the limits of our ability as parents to influence our children?
6.  If not parents, then how do we explain the troublesome behavior of young adults?

We didn't have any firm opinions on these matters.  As family life educators and professionals who study parenting, child development and families, should we be talking about this issues.  Should we respond to cartoons like this? 

Survey of Parents who use the Internet

Despite all the anecdotal evidence that parents are using the Internet as a part of their role in parenting there is very little solid scientific evidence that tells us much about what they are doing.

Colleagues from the University of Minnesota are trying to fill in this gap with a survey of parents.

The Parenting 2.0 research project, sponsored by the University of Minnesota, is looking for parents who use the Internet to participate in an online research study. The study involves filling out a 20-minute online survey about how and why you use the Internet. If you know parents or work with parents, we would appreciate your sending the message below to them. Attached, we have also included a message that can be posted on websites or Facebook. Please use the message that best meets your needs.

The purpose of the Parenting 2.0 research project is to learn more about the ways that and the reasons why parents use technology. Results from this study will be used to help develop parent education resources.

If you have any questions about the study, please visit our website at: http://www.cehd.umn.edu/fsos/parent20/

or contact Dr. Jodi Dworkin at jdworkin@unm.edu or Dr. Susan Walker at skwalker@umn.edu. If you are interested in getting information about the results, click here to sign up to be notified about the findings.

Models of Crowdsourcing Applied to Family Life Education

In his book, Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe, identifies four general models of crowdsourcing-- crowd wisdom, crowd creation, crowd voting and crowd funding. Each of these models can be applied to the creation of family life education websites.

Crowding sourcing wisdom about family life.

Although we have significant information about human development and families, there are still many applications to particular challenges or particular children that reside in the daily experience of individual parents and family members that could be helpful to others. Most family life educators who work with groups (F2F or online) know the value of inviting the participants to share their strategies and ideas about questions and issues facing one another. In open social networking sites for parents you see a lot of this type of discussion. One parent poses a challenge and others suggest ways to deal with the situation. Sometimes bad advice is offered, but often times there are helpful suggestions. There are many ways to extend and encourage this crowd sourced wisdom from family members.

Crowd creation of family life educational experiences.

Family life education sites can move beyond simply capturing the wisdom of family members and involve families in designing and developing the educational experiences. Family members could be included in serving as a moderator of open forums of parent discussions. Participants might monitor topics of interest to particular families (for example, parents of children with autism) to identify hot, relevant, or new issues. Participants could be invited to write, record or video content that to illustrate a particular point. (Note: There are many developmental issues in the lives of children that can most easily be illustrated by video better than words. Family life education would be powerfully advanced by having easy access to short video clips of these developmental milestones. Asking parents to provide video examples of developmental milestones would dramatically increase the our ability to help parents understand human development and enrich the text descriptions of these topics.)

Crowd voting in family life education.

The simple version of "crowd voting" is to ask readers of family life education websites to rate articles, videos, etc. on usefulness or other qualities. Participants can also be asked to write reviews or reactions to topics. (this may be more crowd creation than voting.) Clearly, if a family life educational website were successful in gathering crowd created material, there would be many opportunities to include the participants in rating and commenting on the various creations.

Crowd funding of family life education.

At present the most common model of funding on the Internet has been an advertiser model. There are still relatively few examples in which people contribute to the funding of content delivery. One model that might work for family life education is the model used by ESPN and tried by several newspapers in which much of the content is available for free, but their is some "in-depth content" created by the most popular commentators that is only available by subscription. This might work in family life education settings. Another version of this would be to offer more individualized experiences for participants that would provide more in-depth support or help through a paid subscription process.

Summary.

There are numerous opportunities to engage parents and other family members in "crowd-based" strategies for interacting, developing and advancing family life education. This is an important area of further exploration.

Early Learning Educational Platform-- Required Features

Here is a working list of the features and tools that would be available in a robust early learning educational platform.

• Need to create an educational and technical framework within which a variety of short and extended educational experiences can be incorporated.

• Needs to have a sustainable development and maintenance system in which people can contribute for short periods and be replaced without major disruption to the enterprise.

• Needs to be scalable so that the work can grow and yet still be managed.

• Needs to take advantage of existing material and accommodate new material.

• Needs to be able to handle text, audio and video formats…and any new formats.
  

• Needs to be able to use a variety of levels of manpower in effective ways—interested amateurs, county level extension staff, non-extension professionals, state-level extension staff, university faculty without extension appointments, undergraduate and graduate students.
  

• Includes convenient ways for people to contribute individually without much much efforts (e.g., Wikipedia model—in which when you encounter any page, you can register and contribute).

• Includes a range of short (e.g., text FAQs, 1 minute video or audio clips, etc.) and extended educational experiences
  

• Should include educational experiences that serve a range of types of learners from one-time, specific questions to in-depth experiences that would result in college credit. The platform would include all the levels in between.

• Needs to have ways for contributors to get credit.

• Needs to be designed in ways that foster credibility with the audiences. This might be different at different levels of the educational experiences.
  

• For each type of “contribution” there needs to be easy tools to use to contribute. For example, there are just a few steps to follow to upload a video onto YouTube. Likewise, on Wikipedia, the text editor is right there to use.
  

• There needs to be a variety of instructional tools—a text FAQ maker, a quiz maker, a tool to build an educational path that links a series of FAQs into a longer educational experience (from text FAQ to a factsheet that combines several FAQs to a series of factsheets that might be the equivalent of a “book chapter,” a series of chapters that might compose a book or course text.

• Other instructional tools would be a quiz maker that might use the FAQs, a data collection tool such as survey maker for collecting information that may serve as a variety of feedback, educational and scientific purposes, data presentation tools or ways to easily display charts and graphs, presentation tools or ways to incorporate audio & slides, or text and slides, or video, and probably more.
  

• Another instructional tool might be a “story-telling” tool that fosters the development of richer examples of understanding human development and family life concepts.
  

• This platform should include a variety of opportunities for social networking and community-building.

• What else?
  

Early Learning Educational Platform-- What's Missing?

Over the last several years, Illinois has been building an educational and professional development infrastructure for child care (early learning) professionals. This project known as "Gateways to Opportunity" is designed to bring together all the resources for educating beginning and advanced professionals interested in early care and education. Additionally, there has been a long-term effort to integrate many of the resources for parents and professionals at the Illinois Early Learning Project.

These efforts have advanced the resources for parents and professionals interested in young children and have developed a wide array of useful tools-- newsletters for early learning professionals, a listserv for professionals interested in early care, descriptions of early learning standards and video examples of classrooms, teaching and work with parents, parent materials in Spanish, English and Polish, and much more. There are also many useful links to other resources on the web.

Despite all this useful material, I still feel like something is missing and there is something about the design of these websites that is lacking.

Review of the Illinois Early Learning Project Website

One difficulty is the conceptual structure of this website-- it is organized by structural features of the material rather than by the content. For example, there is a section on "videos" and "tip sheets" (which is actually a reference to the fact that these are designed as print materials). Organizing material by delivery mode is a structural characteristic of the delivery system, but not a characteristic that would be particularly important to a parent or professional who is more likely to be interested in a particular topic, issue or question. This points to another problem with these materials which is that parent and professional material is intertwined. The Illinois Early Learning Project website could easily be organized by the type of learner/client/audience so that parents could find the materials designed for them and professionals could find materials addressed to them.

Review of the Gateways to Opportunity Website

This website is better organized to address the needs of particular types of potential audiences (parents, students, current professionals, etc.) and there is a lot of useful resources located in each section, but I still have the feeling that the organizational structure reflects the resources rather than the interests or questions of the audience. For example, in the section designed for higher education faculty there are many useful links to appropriate resources, but they could be organized around the tasks or needs that higher education might be interested in such as: resources for getting approval as an entitled program, resources for professional development, resources for your students, new teaching resources, and so forth. In short, the website could be organized around the questions or concerns of the audience.

This organizational structure may result in people overlooking valuable resources. For example, the website has an extensive list of research reports listed under the section titled, Resources, but there is no link to this directly from the higher education pages. This list of research studies is likely to include a number of items that would be of interest to higher education faculty either for their own professional development or for their instruction to students.

Adding Interaction, Participation and Community

Increasing websites are incorporating opportunities for online users to interact on the website, participate in the creation of knowledge and building community. (See my general description of these topics and links to other resources about these issues.) In order to build an effective platform to education and professional development in early learning, we will have to build a platform in which there are opportunities for parents and professionals to engage with each other and with the creation of content in these online settings. This means moving beyond websites as places to find information or to tell people about the issues. This calls for a different type of design and a more open online platform.

This is the big challenge for those interested in building an effective learning platform for early learning.

eXtension-- evaluation, FAQs, and keyword searching

This post covers three topics: evaluation, FAQs, and search optimization.

Evaluation of Just In Time Parenting

This session focused on evaluating website information. Sally Martin, the Just In Time Parenting team leader in evaluation, was the lead presenter.

She provided an overview of the development of the evaluation tools for Just In Time Parenting.

Much of the work was traditional evaluation best practice that involved creating survey items that matched the content. The tool was pilot-tested by potential parents to check for readability and clarity. The items were also reviewed by other professionals. All of this resulted in a revised tool.

She also described the infrastructure so that the data obtained from this survey can be shared at the county and state levels. A guide to evaluation has been developed and posted at: http://www.parentinginfo.org

The Financial Planning group talked about an evaluation questionnaire that they designed to assess people's reactions to the FAQs. They have only had "three" responses so far. There was much discussion about "too much" evaluation and asking too many questions. The FAQ survey was viewed by some as overkill. Sally Martin made a useful point that we should be piloting our evaluation strategies to see what others think about these rather than launching full-blown evaluation efforts that the public will respond to.

FAQs

Identified "high maintenance" FAQs that are likely to change, get updated or have web links. These FAQs are reviewed at least annually. This is a good reminder that some questions need more attention than others.

The Consumer Horticulture group is using Master Gardeners to answer consumer questions and to conduct reviews of FAQs. This is a good example of involving the public in the website.

Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Research

One of the first steps on effective use of keywords is to begin to understand the popularity of various keywords. There are a couple of tools that will help with this. These are:

Wordtracker
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/


Google Adwords
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal


By putting keywords into these tools you can find out how often people are using these words in searches. In some cases this will also also provide information about how many other sites are using these keyword (that is, what kind of competition is there for this keyword).

What to do to improve using keywords to work with search engines?

1. Integrate keywords into headings and subheadings in the page.
2. Use the keywords to link to other pages.
3. However, don't let keywords distract from providing people with useful information.

eXtension-- opening session, Louisville, KY

Thanks to wireless access throughout the Brown Hotel, I can sit in the meeting room and type you this message as the opening session begins.

One quick observation regarding participants in eXtension is that there are now three "communities of practice" that have ties to "family life." In addition to Just In time Parenting there is the Family Caregiver group and the newly formed "child care" team. Our colleagues are spread across these teams. Clearly we have numerous issues in common and there are many joint opportunities, issues and topics that we can explore together. As we go forward we should think about how we work across these teams.

All the conference presentations are being recorded so you have the opportunity to watch the program as well. These will all be linked to the eXtension wiki. As this unfolds I will add these links directly.

I have tagged all the entries of "COP_2008" so you can find all our entries for the conference in one place.

National Conference on Extension Communities of Practice

I thought it would be nice to include you in our participation in the conference this week so I invited Diana Del Campo, Aaron Ebata and Sally Martin to join me on my blog to post some things about the conference during the week.

I have subscribed all of you to the blog so you will get our posting as email, but if you really want to participate and comment about our ideas, then you will have to go to the blog and comment directly. (Note: You are getting this email as a first posting so you could comment on this to begin with.)

I don't think we will overwhelm you with email, but I do hope that by our reporting information and ideas that this will be a way of continuing to develop Just In Time Parenting.

Here is the agenda for the conference. If you see any sessions that you think we should definitely attend, please let us know. We look forward to our blog conversation.