Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Today, I am at Fordham University, presenting at their summer literacy institute focusing on 21st Century Literacies. I am honored to have the opportunity to present with Kathi Yancey, and she is currently in the middle of her session about “Blogging Alive,” asking participants to think about the purposes and audiences for blogging.

She began by asking people to make a concept map of their blog search, beginning by choosing a question and then using Google blog search to find anwers to their question. She made the point that she was less concerned about the answer to the question than about the process of the search itself. She asked students to then create a concept map outlining their search, and to make sure to include the links from one blog post to another, thus showing the nodes that developed.

Next, she discussed a variety of purposes for blogging, including students writing to and with each other. She also suggested that students connecting their school lives with the world such as the the blog of unecessary quotation marks.

Finally, she asked how we might use blogs as spaces for online learning this year. She talked about the ideas of “misfires” and “workarounds.” Misfires in the sense that an assignment designed for a particular purpose doesn’t really work the way it is supposed to, but you can learn from it. Workaround in the sense that you may have planned for one thing, but got another (e.g., planned for a lab, but only got one computer in your classroom). She also shared Wordle, and showed us how to make a Wordle image from the words we used to describe the MAPS of digital writing this morning.

Image created using www.wordle.net

An enjoyable day all around, I appreciate the invitation from Marshall George to present as a part of the 21st Century Literacies institute this year.

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This morning, we are in the middle of week two of our Chippewa River Writing Project summer institute, and the timing for writing this post couldn’t be better.

Yesterday, we went to the CMU library and our English reference librarian, Aparna Zambare, gave us an introduction to the library databases and Zotero. Minus a few technical glitches with getting Firefox installed, participants in the institute were immediately drawn in to Zotero, figuring out how to use it to cite materials from the library’s databases, link to books on Amazon, take snapshots of current web pages, and then tag and make notes on their items. As they begin to frame their teacher research projects, I felt that introducing Zotero as a bibliography management tool would provide them with a constant place to keep track of their sources and reflections on those sources. So far, it seems to have worked, with one participant commention about how he could see using this tool in his classroom next fall.

Then, this morning, we are being introdcued to the idea of creating a personal learning network by Sara Beauchamp, Technology Liaison from the Upper Peninsula Writing Project. She introduced us to the idea of the Networked Student, which led into a conversation amongst participants about how and why we might want to learn these tools for our own learning as well as for use in our classroom. She reminded us that using all of these tools can become overwhelming if we let them, and that they are messy when we begin using them. Yet, over time, you can learn to adapt some of the tools to make them useful to you.

She continued by sharing RSS in Plain English and Google Reader in Plain English. We then moved into the process of setting up their Google Readers. We are thinking about all of this in the context of teacher research projects, and Sara also framed the demo around some of the ideas in Christensen’s Disrupting Class. As the demo continued, participants set up their readers with feeds related to their personal interests and professional inquiry. We then had time to add feeds to our Reader and think about how to structure folders to that the information is organized.

Through both presentations, we came to think more about how information is accessed, shared, and integrated into our own research and learning. This is a good point for us to be at as we begin developing our teacher research projects and reach the mid point of our summer institute. More learning to come!

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In the few moments that I have before beginning the second day of the Chippewa River Writing Project summer institute, I wanted to pause to reflect on what happened in day one as it relates to digital writing. We were able to get up and running with very little trouble in way of having people use their own laptops, connecting to the network, navigating the wiki, and begin posting discussion items and making page changes.

As we continue on today, we are going to introduce Google Docs as a means for creating collaborative responses, begin looking at the tools for creating digital stories, and also continue use of the wiki for posting teaching demonstration materials and continuing with online discussions.

My overall impression of participants’ thoughts on all of this is that they are quite comfortable with the technologies, as we have introduced them slowly and purposefully. As we continue working with digital storytelling this week, I want to allow for plenty of play time that is framed by discussions about how and why we (and our students) should compose in digital environments. To me, the play time in these early stages is the most important part, so along with discussions about the writing process and writing pedagogy, I am hoping that people just feel the freedom to play and explore in this first week of the institute.

One thing that we have to figure out is how we plan to sustain our site’s work after the institute. I know that this is a topic of great consideration at many rural sites, and it will be no different here. I have been thinking about the affordances and constraints of setting up a Ning, a Facebook group, a Google group (list serv), or some combination of all of them. I don’t want to be spread across too many digital spaces, but I am not sure that our wiki will serve that purpose for keeping everyone connected in an immediate manner. There was talk of Twitter yesterday, too, but again I am not sure that is the best way for us to stay in touch as a local network. Any ideas are welcome!

Time to get moving into day two. My goal is to post more regularly as we move through the next four weeks, talking about the successes and surprises of working in a digital writing project.

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From the FRONTLINE Newsletter

DIGITAL NATION: EDUCATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
———————————————————
FRONTLINE continues its yearlong exploration of life on the digital frontier with its multiplatform Web and documentary project “Digital Nation.” The next installment — coming in mid-June — will explore “Education in the Digital Age” with a Web-exclusive chapter on educational Technology and a new video feature “How Google Saved a School.”

Coming Soon: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

Contribute to “Digital Nation”: Educators can create and share their stories and experiences with technology in the classroom through “Your Digital Nation,” our user-generated video site. Are you skeptical about the use of technology in the classroom? Do your students thrive with computers and laptops? Has technology contributed to an embarrassing or enlightening moment in your school?

Learn how to submit your stories: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/participate

From our site visit earlier this winter, the media and public relations team at CMU has put together an article and podcast about the Chippewa River Writing Project. I find it fitting that as we pursue digital writing within the project that the way in which it was announced to the CMU community comes in the form of a web-based article and podcast.

CMU becomes site for National Writing Project

The National Writing Project, a federally funded professional development program with nearly 200 sites, provides over 7,000 programs for K-16 teachers across the country, reaching more than 135,000 participants in 2008. The CRWP was one of ten new sites established in the U.S. this year.

“We aim to develop programs unique to CRWP that will distinguish us in the state and nation by addressing the issues that face us in northeastern Michigan. We will do so by utilizing technology for distance learning and building on the strengths of the English department and interests of local teachers,” said Troy Hicks, a CMU English faculty member and director of the CRWP.

Hicks is optimistic about the impact the writing project site will have on teachers in the area.

“My goal is to establish the CRWP as a site that partners with teachers in suburban and rural settings throughout northeastern Michigan, utilizing technology to both support their professional learning as well as to become a key component in their own teaching,” Hicks said.

My journey with the National Writing Project began in 2003 with my participation in my first summer institute at Red Cedar Writing Project and has continued to take me in places, personally and professionally, that I could not have imagined. To say that beginning a new writing project is a dream come true, despite the cliche, would be an understatement. So, it is with great anticipation that I look forward to our summer institute that begins in a few short weeks.

As a key component of the summer institute, we have created a wiki to organize, share, and archive our writing, teaching demos, and discussions. My hope is that by working with a digital writing space as our main point of contact in the summer institute, we will establish the habits of mind that will make collaborating and communication with digital writing tools a part of the fabric of our writing project. Because our service area will cover so many rural communities in northern Michigan, my plan is to engage teachers and students in digital writing so that they have opportunities to connect outside of their classroom, school, and district in meaningful ways, with technology being a part of an equation that focuses first on the writer and then on the mode and media of the writing.

So, as the summer institute gets closer and I have more opportunities to think about how we are engaging in digital writing, my hope is to capture some of that thinking here. In additional to having human subjects research approval and media releases from all the participants in the summer institute, my plan is to blog more regularly so we can really document how a digital writing project unfolds in its first year.

Wish us luck, and feel free to join the wiki and contribute, too!

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As the end of the semester approaches, the pace quickens for us as we plan for our inaugural summer institute at the Chippewa River Writing Project. In conversations that began many months ago and have stretched across talks with NWP folks like Will, Bud, Paul, Peter, and Sara, my thinking on what I want for a web presence for our site has been boiled down to the public face through our own website as well as a workspace for our teachers in this wiki. These conversations have now led me to a chat today with my writing group, Rob and Jim, both of whom are working with writing projects at their own universities.

The topic — what does it mean to have a “digital writing project?”

Now, I do not mean to be presumptuous here. There are plenty of writing projects who are doing digital writing in some way. And, many of them are doing outstanding work, leading the field of K-12 digital writing, as represented in the new collection - Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom (which we will likely use in our summer institute).

Our site can do something different, however, from the very first moment of our orientation that happens next month, through our summer institute, and into all the work of our site thereafter. We will be a digital writing project from the get go. We begin our work as a site with the expectation that digital writing is simply a part of our work. I am not sure how other sites that have begun in the past few years view their use of technology to support the site, represent their work, and connect their teachers, but I see our site as being a digital writing site because the use of blogs, wikis, collaborative word processors, digital stories, and other media will be a constant part of our work. From the initial Google form that teachers used to apply to their final digital portfolios this summer, digital writing will simply be a part of our site’s identity.

So, what does this look like for the writing project summer institute? Rob encouraged me to think about what I want participants to know and be able to do, and how those skills contribute to a deeper understanding of digital literacy. Here are some thoughts right now:

Personal writing
Participants will be invited and encouraged to share their alphabetic writing through a blog or wiki page, as well as by using collaborative word processors. In addition, as a component of personal writing in the summer institute, we will encourage them to create multimodal writing, most likely in the form of digital stories for this first summer. Through alphabetic and multimodal writing shared across digital spaces, participants will have a better understanding of how and why to choose different media for production of and response to writing.

Teaching demonstrations
Participants will again be invited and encouraged to share their teaching demonstrations on the CRWP wiki. We can show them how to upload and embed images, audio, slide shows, chat rooms, and other media, as well as how to use the discussion and history functions of the page to invite their peers into their presentation in ways otherwise not available without the technology present. This will, over time, create an archive of teaching demonstrations that will be both horizontally aligned by SI cohort and grade level within those cohorts as well as vertically from year to year, thus showing major themes in each summer’s institute. By inviting participants to create their teaching demo on a wiki page, we are creating an automatic archive that we can look to in the future for purposes of research, reflection, and professional development.

Reading research groups
In thinking about ways that we want participants to engage with one another and keep track of their own reading and research, there are a number of tools such as delicious, Diigo, and Zotero that I want them to be aware of and, ideally, use as research tools. As we engage in the process of reading, online and offline, and keeping track of that information by using digital writing tools, we will be teaching participants skills that they can use for their own professional learning as well as share with their students who are learning to become digital researchers themselves.

Writing response groups
As perhaps the key element of the summer institute, participants will share their writing in response groups. By using blogs, wikis, and collaborative word processors, we will be able to see the benefits and constraints of each tool including how they can be used in public and private ways. By inviting participants to think about what it means to respond in face to face and digital environments, we can compare the ways in which the context shapes our response process. Also, we can think about how offering comments through digital tools such as microphones or voice recorders can change the response process, too.

So, as I thought through all of these things, Rob and Jim asked me what this means for the culture of our site. This is bringing together my interests in digital literacy, teacher professional development, and the teaching of writing. So, of course, it leads me to a number of questions:

• How does an explicit focus on digital writing affect the experience of being in the summer institute?
• There is lots of research and writing done about relationships that individuals develop within institutes, but there is not as much about the vertical relationships that expand over time. How can being a digital writing project help these relationships materialize?
• We know that the NWP experience is powerful. What makes this such a powerful experience for teachers and how can we track it digitally? 
• How will a deeper understanding of how and why to use digital writing tools change participants’ perceptions of what they can and should do in their classroom?

Jim also suggested that participants create a literacy autobiography before the summer institute, but ask them to do so by creating it with a digital tool with which they are comfortable. This would help set the tone for the summer and provide us with an icebreaker activity in the first days when people share their autobiographies.

Of course, one of my jobs this summer will be to identify the two or three participants that can help do this kind of digital writing work next year and invite them to become leaders at our site.

What, then, am I going to do in a practical sense? Well, here are some thoughts right now:

• At the orientation, have participants sign up for Wikispaces and Gmail, doing demos of each with the expectation that they will use each for SI work
• Create a Google group that we will use for communication between the orientation and the summer institute and then beyond
• In the institute, explicitly introduce blogs, wikis, and collaborative word processors for a variety of purposes
• Also, in the institute, focus on digital storytelling early on so that participants can consider creating one for their final portfolio
• Introduce research tools such as social bookmarking and Zotero
• Require that participants create a digital portfolio for at least part of their final project

So, those are some initial thoughts. I will be curious to see how this develops and how teachers react to the overall experience of working in (and then reflecting on their work in) a digital writing project. I look foward to the journey. 

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Just today, a colleague of mine was telling me that I need to be better at self-promotion. So, here goes…

Future teachers (college students now) use blogs and wikis to share their own writing—so they can someday help their own students do the same.

“Teachers are teaching the digital generation,” explained Troy Hicks, assistant professor of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University, where he instructs preservice teachers.

(MEA Voice, February 2009, p. 10)

Earlier this year, I was interviewed by a reporter for the MEA as a part of their special issue on teaching with technology. The interview was an hour long, and very engaging, so the very short quote here seems to just barely scratch the surface of what we talked about. That said, I am honored to be featured in this publication along with my friend and colleague Dawn Reed.

Given the many conversations that I have had with colleagues over the past few months about the uses of digital writing, and especially with my own pre-service teachers in ENG 315, I am becoming more and more encouraged that this is becoming a part of the discourse in educational circles. For instance, at MRA a few weeks ago, one of the comments about our session on writing across the curriculum was that a participant wished she could have heard more about the digital writing tools I was suggesting in order to support that work.

So, thanks to the MEA for featuring me in their article and to everyone who continues to push technology and writing in new directions. As always, I am enjoying the continuing conversation.

Digital Storytelling: Enhancing Language, Visual, and Media Literacies

MRA 2009 Presentation

Ledong Li, Tingfeng Luo, Wen Wu, Fan Zhang, Oakland University

• What’s Your Story?
• Stories Surround Us
• What is digital storytelling?
• Daniel Meadows: “short personal multimedia tales told
  from the heart”

• Educational Use of Digital Storytelling
• Focus on specific topic and contain a particular point of
  view
• Topics range from personal tales recounting historical
  events, exploring life in one’s own community, to the search for life
  in other corners of the universe
• They can vary in length, but in education they typically
  last between 2-10 minutes

• Procedure
• Write script
• Collect assets
• Create storyboard
• Draft, edit, and finalize
• Publish it as a movie file

• Hardware
• Computer
• External hard drive/flash drive
• Headset with microphone
• Scanner
• Digital Camera/Digital Video Camera
• Facilities with access to internet

• Software
• Movie Tools: Flash, Premiere, Photostory, Movie Maker,
  iMovie
• Imaging Tools: Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, iPhoto
• Audio: Audition, iTunes, Garageband, Audacity
• Players: Windows Media Player, iTunes, VLC, Flash

• Why digital storytelling?
• Storytelling has been important to individuals since the
  early days of civilization
• In education, storytelling remains a way to teach subtle
  points and make elusive abstractions concrete
• With the latest development of computers, multimedia
  systems, and the Internet, “images, sounds, animations, and video
  clips” can be brought together with “texts,” providing a wide range of
  story formats

• The Changing World
• Friedman, “The World is Flat”
• Globalization 1.0 (1492 - 1800) Countries/trade
• Globalization 2.0 (1800 - 2000) Companies/labor
• Globalization 3.0 (2000 - Present) Individuals/internet

• Moving from web 1.0 to web 2.0
• Mode: Reading to writing
• Primary Unit of Content: Page to post
• State: Static to dynamic
• Viewed through: Web browser to Browsers, RSS Readers,
  phones
• Architecture: Client server to web services
• Content created by: Web coders to everyone
• Domain of: Geeks to “mass amateurization”

• What does this mean for learning?
• Obvious answers
• New technologies and tools
• Different workflow processes
• Competition and expectations of end users

• Less obvious answers
• New expectations for the relationship between learners
  and instructors
• New modes of writing and communication
• New literacies

• Web 2.0 to Literacy 2.0
• Web 2.0 - business model focused on a service rather than
  product that values participation, collaboration, and distribution
• Literacy 2.0 - students are appropriating digital
  applications, networks, and services; they are developing new ways of
  reading, writing, viewing, listening, and recording — new ways that
  embody this 2.0 environment
• Literacy 2.0 necessarily involves extensive
  participation, collaboration, and distribution of expertise and
  intelligence

• Purpose of our Study
• Engaging graduate students (in-service teachers) and
  undergraduates (pre-service teachers) in how to make digital stories
• Examine the potential of digital storytelling used to
  enhance traditional and new literacies
• Bridging literacy methods, changing perspectives, how to
  inform instruction

• Roles that participants played
• Writers
• Text editors
• Visual designers
• Image editors
• Voice recording specialists
• Audio editing
• Movie producers

• Impacts on education
• Practical and learner-centered
• Meets ed tech standards
• Enhances literacies: language, visual, media
• Helps build useful skills in web 2.0/literacy 2.0:
  participation, collaboration, distribution

Today, I received an exciting announcement from Kellie Bramlet with MIT Press Journals. In addition to the series of books that they released last year with a Creative Commons license, they are now offering the following new journal:

The International Journal of Learning and Media

MIT Press, in cooperation with The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), is pleased to announce the publication of the first issue of The International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM). A first of its kind, the journal is devoted to examining the intersection of media and learning in multiple contexts. Volume 1, Issue 1, edited by David Buckingham, Tara McPherson and Katie Salen, is now available for FREE at http://ijlm.net . While IJLM retains the peer-review process of a traditional scholarly journal, its editorial vision and electronic-only format permit more topical and polemic writing, visual and multimedia presentations, and online dialogues. IJLM will allow the broad community interested in digital media and learning to share its insights using the tools of digital media. Sections of the journal range from shorter pieces on critical issues of a timely nature, through longer essays on keywords shaping the landscape of learning and media today, to traditional peer-reviewed scholarly articles.

http://ijlm.net is currently in its beta stage and we welcome your comments, questions and thoughts on how to improve the site. Please contact us by clicking on the Feedback button in the upper right corner at http://ijlm.net

The development and publication of IJLM is supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its 5-year, $50 million, initiative in digital media and learning.

Been a long time since I’ve been blogging… hope to get “caught up” on some emerging ideas over spring break. But, for now, here is some good news from RCWP. Congrats to Janet for her leadership and all my colleagues whose work made this award possible!

The Engaged Scholar - Featured MSU Engaged Faculty - Janet A. Swenson

Janet Swenson knows that effective communication depends on far more than simply the written word. Over the past few years numerous powerful and inexpensive communication technologies have become available to the average user. Cell phones enhanced with camera, video, and keyboard capacities, along with fully functioning, highly portable mini-notebook computers, have emerged in conjunction with Internet-based social networking and collaborative writing opportunities.

Since 1993 Swenson has directed the Red Cedar Writing Project (RCWP), an educational outreach program and professional development network that serves teachers of writing at all grade levels. RCWP is also MSU’s site of the National Writing Project, which aims to improve student achievement across the United States by improving the teaching of writing and improving learning. Keeping pace with emerging technologies is one of the ways that RCWP does that.