The Digital Society course is now two years old, and students received their first set of results this summer. So I would like to send out a huge congratulations to all of them including my trailblazing six students - well done! (I believe the milestone is important enough for me to trial my new LinkedIn plugin as well hope it works.) However, I just recently checked the IB statistics for numbers entering the Digital Society course and they are a huge disappointment. The last year of ITGS 2275 students took the course (May 2023), and for Digital Society the first cohort 2360 students took the subject (May 2024.)

Only 85 new students, when the course was specifically designed for specialists (e.g. IT and CS teachers) but also non specialist Individuals and Societies teachers to be able to teach? Over this blogpost I will talk a little more about the subject, its brilliance but also some of the problems that I believe can easily be surmounted; so that hopefully some of you in IB schools may make the decision to add Digital Society to your curriculum offering.

Its forerunner ITGS always had its heart in the right place as a course, but its assessments, age and conceptual underpinning was somewhat lacking. The design of the new course and publicity by Joel Adams from the IB was key in making sure the course was different enough to lead to a successful new pathway for many more students.

As zeitgeist would have it, first teaching in 2022 came at just the point that generative AI and ChatGPT3 boisterously announced itself to the world. I remember starting the units of Media and AI, and focusing on 'synthetic digital media' and showing students a number of uses of large language models to their surprise and wonderment. Guess who were the early adopters of AI in my school! I loved my inquiry based formative activity where, unknowingly to them, I placed the coders and the non coders into competing teams and then gave them two lessons to complete a quite complex coding problem in Python (while telling the non-coding team secretly that they could use a LLM to help them.) Guess the astonishment of the coders when the non-coders were declared victors, and then the groans when they realised why.

'Every IB school, in every context - come on start offering Digital Society NOW, you know it is the right thing to do!

The importance of this course in the IB should not be underestimated. It is an option that I believe each student should consider carefully as they choose their Individuals and Societies subject(s), and if necessary persuade the school to run it!

Take image generation, who could believe at the start of the course that I would be able to place in a text prompt and produce a multitude of creative images to enliven this blogpost. But Digital Society is not just about the 'tech' it is about the multitude of ethical and social impacts that arise from almost every context in which technology is used. Around this area a student of DS would immediately consider:

• Power - Intellectual property, who and where does the data come to train this model
• Values and ethics - Creativity, is the use of generative ai image generators a concern for artists and their future employment
• Systems - How biased are these image generators if the datasets underpinning are biased e.g. are students always white
• Expression - is this really art, without 'emotion' or 'feeling' are these images just empty and generic
• Identity - as these image generators get better and better, and are used everywhere how can we judge what is authentic and how does that impact areas such as deepfakes and misinformation

Prompt for Ideogram - "A captivating cinematic photograph of a monochromatic cityscape, with a dedicated student studying diligently at a table. The student's laptop is open, displaying a digital notebook filled with meticulous notes. An AI robot sits attentively beside the student, seemingly engaged in the learning process. The background features bold, eye-catching graffiti that reads "Digital Society is BRILLIANT," blending urban culture with the scene. The atmosphere is a harmonious blend of technology, education, and artistic expression, creating a futuristic yet grounded ambiance."

Note I use Ideogram - as it is one of the only image generators that can truly spell at the moment. A fabulous discussion for DS students to engage in as they unpick the technology behind the 'magic' apart.

So you guessed it. This is a superb course, which is authentic and deals with real world problems and issues and gets students thinking of ways to intervene; and then make a difference in their use of technology alongside understanding its impacts in areas such as politics, business and knowledge. Its is academic, but practical; it is inquiry led (the multimedia video Internal Assessment is excellent) but really tests a student's critical thinking - what is not to like!

Well hear are those surmountable issues and personal thoughts:

So this post is a call to arms for every headteacher to think seriously about adding this course to their curriculum offering, for every student to consider this as a choice and teachers even if you are not a CS/IT teacher to see that this course is simply great fun and inspiring to teach.

'Here is to more than five thousand Digital Society students by 2026!'

Oh! those Obama summer reading lists, or are they Christmas reading lists! Well I definitely got Chip War off of one if his lists. And maybe for this reason last summer on my normal reading binge, i picked up (well browsed) and bought the book "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker. It may have been those constant unhelpful mutterings in my ear from fellow colleagues "...those sixth formers are always asleep in that Common Room, I wonder how that is helping with their studies?"

Well what a read it was, and it simply made me consider and reflect on how little over 15+ years of supporting sixth formers had I not in anyway (besides the occasional comment) focused on sleep having such a dramatic affect in almost every area of our lives, and so teenagers lives. By luck I was rewriting my Core curriculum with a strong emphasis and focus on metacognition, self regulation and felt immediately this would help fit in and support my wonderful sixth formers.

Shocking quotations like the one to the right I thought would jump them into action, and so I went through a plan to introduce the science behind sleeping and then to monitor our students and their sleeping habits.

As always with any new initiative it was crucial that the process to introduce, monitor and ultimately change students behaviour' s was well through through and really did make students over the whole year think and reflect on their habits.

“If you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter. In terms of memory, then, sleep is not like the bank. You cannot accumulate a debt and hope to pay it off at a later point in time. Sleep for memory consolidation is an all-or-nothing event.”

The presentations were quick enough to bring together using information from why we sleep (including Matthew Walker talking to Cognita Education) and another book Life Time, alongside other resources I will share below.

"Chronic sleep deprivation impairs our memory and learning abilities."

First workshop - to introduce the importance of sleep...

Second workshop - to reinforce connection with learning..

Over the following weeks with tutors and student - we looked at their circadian rhythms, we did a survey on their sleep habits using the Munch CQ (see below) and we got them to journal for two weeks individually any differences or issues.

• Munich Chronotype Questionnaire
• Sleep Foundation Log (used to journal)
• Learn then Sleep Research (used with second presentation)
• Top Tips for getting 7-9 hours a night

All worked well anecdotally , data was shared with students; showing how much sleep on average they got, whether they were an owl or a lark, and tutors had individual conversations with certain students whose data was concerning, or shared signs of lethargy in and around the school. But as always it is difficult with such a complex system such as a school, to see if the initiative had any effect on their sleep until late in the year we looked at the four check-in surveys they they had done. results are below:

Fascinatingly enough, and to my surprise there was some evidence of change:

You may say inconclusive with gains in the 6 to 7 hours range of 8%, and a reduction in the 5 hours or less by 8% with not much movement in the greater than 7 hours. Anecdotally (and I will not mention the year before we had an Armenian student that was renowned as sleeping each and everyday) there was a definite drop off (sorry!) on those students found napping during the day. Success maybe - but also room for reflection and thought on some wider issues raised, and what to do the next year to continue the fight. See my thoughts below: