Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

For the first time in four years, I will not be going to an NWP tech/writing style workshop, and I have to admit that I am a little bit bummed. Both Tech Matters and the Technology and Writing retreat have been good sources of inspiration and collegiality over the past few summers, and I hope to capture some of those feelings in two workshops that we are planning for RCWP here in August.

The first week, August 4th, we are engaging 40 teachers from Project WRITE in an immerse, inquiry-driven study of adolescent literacy and technology. Much like Bud’s CyberCamp, we are planning to structure this workshop for teachers to make maximum use of the time, access to computers, and collegial support. For the portion of each day that I am planning, I intend to make the first hour a work/collaboration time, with the explicit goal that teachers will produce anything from one lesson to a whole unit, somehow using read/write web technology, by the end of the week. On Thursday, they will share their work with a group of cross-grade, cross-school colleagues to get feedback.

During the other half of each afternoon, I am taking a move from Tech Matters and creating “birds of a feather” groups. Want to brush up on blogs? Go to this room with this teacher leader. Want to find out about photo sharing, which we haven’t discussed yet as a group, but you want to learn something new? Come to this room with this other teacher leader. And so on. Or, keep working on your unit. Throughout the week, I hope to offer anywhere from 3-6 different experiences for people to sample from, all leading to the presentation of their final lessons.

This will be one of the last major pushes with Project WRITE. In September, we will do one of our sessions completely online. Then, we have two full day sessions on Saturdays — one in October, one in November. I am looking forward to seeing what people pull together for our August session, and to seeing what unfolds for them in the year to come as they more fully integrate technology into their teaching of adolescent literacy.

For the second week, August, 11, we are putting on our own version of Tech Matters for the RCWP leadership team. This will involve myself as a lead facilitator, four additional RCWP teacher leaders as facilitators and presenters of their own classroom case studies, and then a number of participants from the RCWP leadership team. Again, the goal is to collaborate and offer people time and space to work, this time focusing more on the work of our writing project site. Each of the case studies will provide us with a situated look at how one teacher employs technology in his/her classroom, and that will open up conversations for the leadership team about how and why we might employ similar technologies at our site for the summer institute, professional development, continuity programs, and youth programs.

Then, in the afternoon, we will have lots of playtime, where we too can do birds of a feather groupings, allow people time to play with tools introduced in the morning, and continue conversations about the future of our site’s work with technology. In some sense, this is kind of the culminating moment of our work with NWP’s technology initiative, as we are now trying to distribute the knowledge of a few key teacher leaders at our site into the larger leadership team and day-to-day work of the site.

I just wanted to capture my initial thinking on these two workshops as we finalize the SB-CEU applications and get ready to move through the month of July in a haze of firework smoke, BBQs, and long, warm summer afternoons. It is good to be thinking ahead to these events and all the great work that teachers will be engaging in this year as a result of them.

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Notes from Margaret Hedstrom’s “The Future of Networked Knowledge”

Overview Announcement:

Dr. Hedstrom is an archivist who is on the faculty of the School of Information at U of M. Her research interest is digital information. She has done some interesting cross cultural empirical research on user response to various methods of archiving digital files. (e.g. “The Old Version Flickers More:” Digital Preservation from the User Perspective. American Archivist http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/dig-pres_users-perspective.pdf) Not just ease of use but also reliability of stored electronic files.

She is also a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. (Their report available at http://er.lib.msu.edu/item.cfm?item=050123)

Notes from the session:

• Intro
  • Recent feature story from NYT on archiving digital materials
  • We are trying to build networks, facilities, and human capital that takes advantage of the burgeoning world of digital information
  • There are archival questions in every discipline, problems that we encounter in humanities and social sciences, as well as other sciences
  • Today’s talk will be to reflect back on the ACLS Commission’s thoughts on infrastructure for education and the humanities
  • What is the vision and potential of this, as well as the challenges that we experience on a daily basis and others that we can anticipate; then discuss some paths that we can use to move towards this vision
• The Vision
  • The potential for cyber infrastructure allows for transformative research that were not possible for people to address in the past as well as open scholarship
    • This is the big goal for research cyber infrastrucure
  • Looking from the humanities and social science perspective at a report from science and engineering report on cyber infrastructure
    • What could we do if we had massive amounts of digital data, easy-to-use analytical tools, and networks of repositories, and well-trained people to use it?
  • There must be money out there for the scientists, and the humanists could ride on their coat tails, right? Well… it turns out that when you talk to scientists there are problems with funding for research, and competition is intense, too.
    • Many of us from outside of these science communities think that they are networked and forward-thinking, but there are many questions about what makes legitimate science, peer review, qualifications of researchers, etc.
• More thoughts on the vision
  • What do we mean by infrastructure?
    • It is about the protocols for moving data, for sure
    • But, it is also about the people who know how to approach these new resources
      • Archivists who are getting data into shape so others can use it
        • There is a lot of technical work in adding metadata that goes unnoticed and, consequently, is different from what has been done in the physical world
      • To take advantage of this potential, we need to learn how to teach and research in different ways, and these are the bigger stumbling blocks that we need to get over
• There are new ways of addressing research that are happening in a parallel with a move towards interdisciplinarity
  • How do you take ideas that have been historically separated by institutional boundaries that are now coming back together again in a digital convergence?
  • How does an interest in cyber-enabled learning happen in conjunction with this? Is there a dissastisfaction with the compartmentalized visions of scholarship?
  • A goal for cyber infrastructure shifts your way of thinking about research and looking at problems that allows for a new way to think about problems.
• What would “big” humanities (transformative research) mean?
  • Because of the way that humanities research has been done in the past (single investigator, deep problem, specific set of data resources) — the problems have been scaled down to fit within the scope of work for one human being.
  • Now, we can scale the work across a team of people and apply knowledge to much bigger questions
  • Changing the culture is partly a generational change and partly thinking about not trying to convince those who do not want to change their ideas.
  • Some of the big issues with the humanities is that the early attempts to do quantitative research didn’t fit in with the paradigm of what people were trying to look at.
    • What has happened since then is that the kind of resources available to, say, historians, are richer and more vast.
      • You can get census data, yes, but you can also get images, primary texts, and other items more easily
    • UM and Google’s library project — how does a historian go about mining that data?
• Resistance
  • You can enable other kinds of cyber science, but don’t take away from my current budget.
  • Is the work empirical? Does it have rigorous tests of validity? What happens when you triangulate it with other kinds of research?
• Openness in Scholarship
  • Open in both the sense that it is making contributions to research as well as have access to the results
    • The raw materials for the research (documents, data, and even people) are networked and widely accessible
      • In this area, she gives librarians lots of credit for moving forward in this area
      • There are formidable monetary and intellectual property issues to overcome here, though
    • Research becomes much more collaborative
      • It doesn’t mean that the idea of the lone investigator goes out the window
      • Expertise is shared, however, and scholarship is open to new audiences and perspectives
        • Universities have done a disservice by trying to have “quality” through exclusivity
        • What is the line between a free-for-all and a very rich dialogue about the research questions we are trying to pursue?
      • Also, could we engage younger people with a degree of fun? Have we dismissed something that people might find engaging by dismissing it as frivolous?

Challenges

• Where do you start with all of this?
  • There is a complex set of interdependent variables here.
    • How do we do research without a critical mass of resources and tools?
  • There have been some areas in the humanities where things have changed.
    • For instance, in the classics, you find many early adopters because the primary resources are finite (there are only so many original Greek texts) and you can get it online; it is the base of data that everyone draws there conclusions from the ancient world
    • On the other hand, what happens when you look at 20th century history and the endless amounts of content that are out there?
    • What happens when all the volumes in the world are digitized? Of all the primary sources out there, we only have so much money to digitize though…
      • What do we bring out that is trapped?
    • Within the disciplines, there is lots of room for advice from scholars on this
      • Someday, can we help make decisions about what is important in the field and what needs to be digitized?
      • Can we help develop the analytical tools to look at the data?
        • Can we do massive text mining?
        • Visualizations?
      • What about stimulating the demand for this new kind of scholarship?
        • Who wants to take a risk as a young scholar when it could fall flat on deaf ears or it could be the greatest thing since sliced bread?
        • Is there an in-between space that we can translate the goals of that vision on a reasonable scale?
      • Where does the money come from?
        • Most of the physical infrastructure in this country came in the early part of this century. The point is that we do no, as a country, invest in maintaining infrastructure. Universities do a little better at this, but there is more to do to mobilize these resources.

        How do we build an ethos of openness and the public good, when the culture and legal structure locks data up and attaches ownership to them?

• Social and cultural challenges
  • Institutional Roles
    • Incentives and rewards for scholars who take the risk to do research in these new ways
    • There are challenges to the ways of doing this work
      • Conservative, traditional modes of funding
      • Finding others to collaborate with
      • Tenure and what counts as legitimate contributions to scholarship
    • These are all ways of thinking in institutions that are deeply held and may not be antithetical to these newer notions, but certainly don’t jive with them either
      • Everyone’s work will change as a consequence of this shift
    • The role of the brick and mortar university will still attract students from a variety of backgrounds and these interactions will not go away
      • But, what is it that distinguishes one place from another, especially with this notion of openness?
      • What are universities doing to attract faculty?
      • What physical resources does the university have (librar, facilities)?
        • What happens when anyone can get access to these materials? What is the value added by the institution?
      • One of the questions also becomes whether or not we are willing to do something different as well as what we were doing before?
        • Can we teach as much and do elaborate research projects?
          • In libraries, for instance, if we are out there cataloging every web page like we do every book, then there are certain things we can and can not do with every resource.

• Conceptual Challenges

• If we want to draw a variety of perspectives into looking at the problems, then how do we maintain scientific rigor and have inclusion at the same time?
  • The wisdom of crowds argument
  • What if everyone in the crowd is wrong?
  • How far can we push this from opinion to educated judgment
  • Universities that have resources as compared to those who do not
  • Digital ivory tower

• How do we convince skeptics of the potential without solid evidence?
• Avoiding the “trust me” syndrome and making a case for how to spend money

Where to start?

• Starting in the schools, doing things in a connected way is good, but they are doing things on a superficial level and we have not done a good job of packaging this information
  • For instance, American Memory Project from LOC

• Getting info from 19th century and putting it out there for people to gobble up

• Getting the next generation of scholars being more insistent on this kind of work
• Encourage the convinced to talk to those who “don’t get it”
  • Don’t want to be dismissive, but there are some who need to at least not stand in the way for others to bring this work forward
  • There are those who place lots of value in traditional kinds of work and we need to convince them that there are ways to do otherwise
• Look at pockets of innovation and support that work rather than spread things too thin
  • There are things that people are doing, but don’t contribute to the infrastructure
• We can stop doing some things if they don’t seem important
  • The world won’t come to an end if the pre-prints don’t come to the mailbox
• Some kinds of work that might seem frivolous might come to be valuable in the end
  • The gaming metaphor and how there is something profound there
  • If you can learn by doing something with a game, we need to embrace that kind of shift in thinking

My Reflections

As I prepare materials for CMU’s online repository, CONDOR, I have been considering many of these same issues. What “counts” for me in terms of creating blog posts, wikis for my class, opening up content that has been published in “locked” journals? I want to be a young scholar who pushes these issues in my department, college, and university, yet I want tenure, too. I think that I am striking a good balance in doing the types of scholarship that is considered as legitimate by my colleagues and publishing in these types of open forums, yet there are still the nagging concerns that my work will not be understood. So, I continue with the both/and philosophy (publish in books and peer reviewed journals as well as in digital formats such as blogs, podcasts, and other forums).

Certainly, these will be issues that I wrestle with for years to come, if not my entire career, so hearing her talk today helped me see my concerns in a larger educational context.

This past week, I was invited to present an introductory workshop on digital storytelling to a group of teachers in Alpena. Minus some minor glitches in figuring out file management with brand new jump drives, the session went well from both my perspective and that of the attendees. Exit comments were generally positive and, since I will be working with this group again, the suggestions will be very helpful, too.

Yet, in the section of the evaluations that asked teachers to rank items such as the objectives of the workshop being met, the organization, and so forth, all the positive responses were overshadowed by one question that received unusually low marks: “The impact this inservice will have on my teaching will probably be…” Responses here were at least one point lower, on average, than every other category.

This struck me as interesting because, throughout the day, we had been having discussions about access in their schools: access to computer labs and equipment, access to certain websites (such as Flickr), and access to time for planning and implementing such a project. As I reviewed these lower scores, then, I saw them not so much as a reflection on the workshop itself as much a reflection on the school contexts to which these teachers would return the next day.

I write this here not to speculate on any particular way to solve this problem, since we know the digital divide is still evident in all of our work, even in the most well endowed schools. Yet, I found it interesting that a group of engaged professionals who found the process of digital storytelling valuable and wanted to do it with their students felt, at the end of the day, as if this wouldn’t necessarily impact their classrooms due to these issues.

Moreover, I shouldn’t sound bleak, because I know that enacting professional development in the classroom is a long term-process. I wouldn’t be doing this kind of work if I didn’t believe in sustainable change over time.

Yet, these evaluations were a concrete reminder of the very real challenges that even the most motivated teachers will face. This might explain why, at a school that has nearly unlimited technology resources, Patrick Welsh explains why teacher morale is so low. He states:

Of course, the big question isn’t whether teachers like spending their time learning one new gizmo after another, but whether a parade of new technologies will help kids learn. From what I can see, that’s not the case.

A School That’s Too High on Gizmos - washingtonpost.com

I disagree with Welsh’s final claim. What I see is that technologies can help kids learn, if teachers are able to think critically about how to use them.

Yet, even with the time for professional development, sustained inquiry, and collaboration, they walk back into their classrooms with incredible demands on their time and attention that may make digital writing and digital teaching difficult, if not impossible, for them.

Apart from the idea that we give teachers more time or get more computers, what this raises for me is the idea that we have to do to shift our professional focus from “using the tools” to “engaging in literacy practices,” and all the subsequent shifts in teaching and learning that will result.

The problem, then, is how to continue that conversation, while still addressing the day-to-day needs of teaching.

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Over the holiday break, there has been an interesting discussing on the TechRhet list about the OLPC initiative. Aaron Barlow has been leading the con side of the debate, and outlines the argument in his blog, here, and points to articles about failed development projects such as the one here; the pro side generally gives the opinion that we should at least be doing something, both at home and abroad, to close the digital divide.

One of the elements of the pro side of the argument comes from the idea that this is a program built on open-source ethos, and that makes it an honorable project, despite a history of failed development efforts. This is a valid point, yet I think I agree with Barlow’s point that we are still imposing our technological values on other cultures in that sense (having a word processor and other office tools installed, for instance).

What I find lacking from the conversation that would refute his point, however, is the explicitly constructionist approach that the OLPC team has taken in developing software and collaborative properties of the laptops. For instance, the OLPC News Page had a recent post about how the program is designed around constructivist principles, and teachers and students are reporting the benefits of collaboration, such as in Digital Planet’s 12/21/07 story.

As I reflect on the ideas behind OLPC, and the fact that I donated in to the program for my children and children somewhere else in the world, I still feel that this was a worthwhile cause. I agree with Barlow’s main point — that western countries need to be conscious of what we “give” when we give aid. That said, I feel that we all need to be critical consumers of any technology given to (or purchased by) us, including the OLPC. I see this as the basic literacy issue involved — to what extent are the users of this, or any, technology able to compose their own thoughts with it? For the OLPC, I think that the options are wide open.

I look forward to continuing this discussion and exploring the potentials of the OLPC initiative, both with my own kids and in the larger educational communities that are forming around it. So far, we have figured out some of the basic options, individual and collaborative, in the writing, chat, browser, draw, and tamtamjam programs. More soon

Pulling into the driveway this afternoon, I saw the box perched on our porch. Like the many other holiday packages that arrive, I didn’t give this one much of a thought until I got it inside and began to look at the address label. Pretty quickly, I realized that the computers we ordered from the OLPC program had arrived, and in time for Christmas.

Last month, I mentioned that we might order these for our kids and, in doing so, make the donation to the OLPC foundation to send two other computers to children somewhere else in the world. We debated for a day or two, and with the deadline looming, we ordered them. Since then, the deadline has been extended, which is great, and I’ve heard from others who are thinking about purchasing one or more computers, too, including Kevin Hodgson and a post on Helen Barrett’s blog.

For a number of reasons, I am so glad that we ordered them. I feel very fortunate that 1) we are in a position to be able to purchase two of these machines for our children as tools to enable their digital literacy and 2) that we have them right now, in time for a Christmas gift. Moreover, I also look forward to explaining how the OLPC program works, so our kids will know that we are helping other kids, too. In so many ways, this program epitomizes what I value about education, and I am glad to have been a part of it.

Lastly, the are green and white after all, so how could we resist?

Heather and I took them out of the box tonight, set them up, and got them running in just a few minutes. We only played for a few minutes (so I could write this post), and not nearly as extensively as David Pogue did. I admit, I did check the OLPC Getting Started Guide (which is all online, so as to save paper), to make sure I could connect to our password-protected home network. That was a snap, and in minutes we had figured out how to get online (above, on the left, see one machine with the web browser pointed at the NYT home page) and (on the right) create a brief video for our children saying, “Merry Christmas!” I took a quick tour of some of the programs just to get a sense of the interface, and I think that my 5-year-old daughter is going to pick up on this machine immediately. My 2-year-old son may just enjoy tapping at it for awhile, but my daughter will be able to utilize much of the functionality including a journal, web browser, painting program, and music making program.

So, now that we have the machines, the question is what to do with them: personally, professionally, collaboratively? I am extremely interested in hearing from other educators who have purchased these — for your children or your school — and to begin thinking about how we can use them in productive ways for teaching digital writing. I will be curious to see what the OS on this machine, as well as the apps, can do as I learn how to use it along with my kids.

When you get your hands on one of these incredible machines, please let me know what you are thinking about. Perhaps we can continue to add to the Learning Activities page on their wiki. Or have a meet-up of OLPC users/bloggers at an educational conference somewhere in the near future, perhaps at SITE in March?

At any rate, please let me know what you find out as you begin to explore this fascinating machine and how students learn to compose with it in the broadest sense of text, voice, image, video, and more.

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My colleague Rob Rozema from GVSU has invited my students and I to participate in a new Ning social network, Teach English. I am very excited about the opportunity to be involved in this project, and we will also have students from Allen Webb’s course at WMU join in, too.

As we consider what we will do with this network, I think that we have to ask ourselves a key question about its implementation and potential for use: how do we account for and respond to the contradiction in local, state, and federal policies regarding internet use (for instance, no blogging or social networking) and the call to teach these skills in our schools?

In other words, if we teach students how to use social networks, will they be able to use those skills once they are teaching?

Moreover, this raises another issue that my best friend Steve Tuckey and I were discussing a few weeks back — does taking a technology and reappropriating it for use in schools undermine the excitement and potential uses for that technology?

As an example, we talked about the idea of a “cheese sandwich blog,” one that tells basically accounts for the mundane happenings in everyday life. (If we build 20 million blogs, will the readers come?). Contrast that with the more substantive kinds of blogging that many edubloggers are calling for and teaching; that is, a more “academic” form of blogging. Steve asks, what’s wrong with the cheese sandwich?

He asks this not to be sarcastic (well, OK, maybe a little bit), but more to take a critical approach to how we use blogging. From an email conversation, he says, in part:

by trying to call for highfalutin standards of rigor in what our students blog about, we are essentially trying to colonize one of the most democratic spaces with the self-important hierarchy of academia. We try to set up the same old benchmarks for “good writing” in a new environment, all the while touting the greatness of its promise as something “new.” Seems schizophrenic to me. And don’t get me started on how real-time authoring serves to feed the dragon of continuous assessment…

In other words, if we reappropriate “blogging,” into an academic setting, is it blogging anymore? Or, is the definition of “blogging” (or, perhaps, edublogging), such that a higher level of discourse is now becoming expected above and beyond the typical diary/journal/update blogs of the past. And, with microblogs in Facebook and Twitter, are we going to have to think about how to make that academic blogging, too?

Steve was interested in seeing me raise this point with the other edubloggers that are thinking about similar ideas, perhaps in another forum beyond our blogs, too. Perhaps I will write a letter to EJ or something like that. If others have an idea about where and how we might discuss this issues — the appropriate use and reappropriation of blogging for academic purposes — let me know. It will certainly be on my mind as I prepare for next semester.

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An email from Leigh alerted me to this great set of resources. Check them out:

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning - Series - The MIT Press

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning examines the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect peoples sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.

Thanks to the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation, open access electronic versions of all the books in this series are available. Follow the links from each title description below to read these editions.

For more on the MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative, visit http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org.

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Have I mentioned before that I love Wikispaces? If not, you are hearing it now:

Wikispaces Blog » Blog Archive » Who Are You and What Are You Doing?

Who Are You and What Are You Doing? October 2nd, 2007 by sarah

In our recent mailing, we asked to hear from you – how you ended up using Wikispaces, and what motivated you to stick around and keep using it. And hear we did. In several future blog posts, we will be highlighting some of the responses we received, showing you the diverse ways that you are using Wikispaces.

Troy Hicks, a professor at Central Michigan University, is using wikis to plan and teach his courses. He has been involved with wikis for over a year. Before joining CMU’s faculty, he and other teachers at the Red Cedar Writing Project at Michigan State University began their own project, a wiki “by writing teachers, for writing teachers.” A year later, their space is going strong. They have used it as a place to post workshop outlines, share notes from conferences, link to blogs they are following, and start book lists. It has become one of the primary spaces in which these teachers collaborate to plan workshops and events for the Red Cedar Writing Project.

Of his experience with Wikispaces, Troy says, “Wikispaces is a part of my everyday life as a teacher and teacher educator, and I thank you for the outstanding service that you have created.”

Check it out as a resource for writing or for getting ideas on how to expand your own collaboration.

Thanks to the entire Wikispaces Team for their support of free wikis for K-12 teachers and students.

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Last week, a number of RCWP teachers met to plan professional development for the 2007-08 school year. The meetings went well, as we discussed a number of issues about how and why we should be doing technology/writing PD and we all agreed that we needed to make the sessions compelling to teachers in terms of meeting real needs and stay focused on literacy practices, too.

To that end, the group came up with five topics that we will present over the course of the year, one each month from October through March. Here is a list of topics and the technologies that we will explore in each.

• Why Technology? Exploring New Literacies (RSS and Overview of Read/Write Web)
• Reading, Writing, and Researching Online (Searching, Evaluating, and Documenting with Social Bookmarking, Google Notebook, and Zotero)
• Creating a Community of Writers Using Technology (Blogs, Wikis, Google Docs, EZines)
• Free, Easy, and Legal Resources for Creating Content (Copyright, Fair Use, Creative Commons, Open Source)
• Communicating Beyond the Classroom (Public and private spaces, Email rhetoric and groups, Flickr)

We are starting to post agendas on our wiki and look forward to hearing what you all think. In particular, do you think that:

• We give a good survey of available technologies?
• We move through the ideas in each workshop and over the series in a coherent manner?
• Teachers would be willing to pay to come to these sessions (once a month on Thursdays, from 6:00 - 8:30 PM)?

Any feedback that you have would be great. I am in the midst of transitioning from MSU to CMU this week, so I apologize about the lack of posts, but I hope to get back in the swing of posting soon.

A few weeks ago in Chico, I was fortunate enough to meet John Bishop from the other RCWP, Red Clay Writing Project located near Atlanta, and we had a splashing good time there!

Since then, I have been following his blog and I am particularly interested in the recent post that he created about exploring digital storytelling for youth. He asks some key questions there, one being:

3. How can we help foster skills/practices that are “marketable” for youth? In other words, how can we acknowledge various economic/power structures youth face as they navigate through (and exit) different stages of their educational lives? How does/should our work interact with public school curriculums?

I find this particular question relevant to me on three fronts this week as I spend time in meetings and workshops for our writing project’s work. Some of it is still up in the air, so I won’t go into detail here, but three additional questions emerge for me based on some things that are happening in Michigan.

First, Allen Webb has compiled a website that addresses the implementation of the new Michigan High School Content Standards. There is plenty more info there for you to get the entire story, but basically it boils down to the fact that many English teachers in MI are feeling pressure to develop common curriculum and assessments, one that are not — in John’s words — developing “marketable” skills or digital literacies. There is also a petition to sign, and I think that it is worth considering the broader curricular pressures that teachers are under in the scope of John’s questions. How, then, do we begin to engage in serious curricular conversations about teaching digital writing when more and more prescribed curricula seem to be coming down the pike that fail to address it at all?

Second, I am currently attending a workshop sponsored by the Eastern Michigan Writing Project on NWP’s Analytical Scoring Continuum, a scoring rubric redesigned from the six traits model. It has been an interesting workshop so far, and his given us lots to think about in our site’s work and what I will be doing with my pre-service teachers in the fall. That said, my colleague Marcia and I were talking in the car on the way home about the fact that this rubric — like all state assessment/six traits type rubrics — seems to be focused on print-based modes of composition and almost inherently neglects the demands of digital writing. For instance, the idea that writing is “clear and focused” can certainly apply to a blog post like this (I hope), but does it apply to someone creating hypertext fiction with a wiki? This is not a criticism of the model so much as it is me raising the concern, again, that schools are not even thinking about teaching digital writing, let alone beginning to understand the paradigm shift associated with teaching it. How do we help make that shift?

Third, we are beginning to plan for next year’s professional development and — besides needing to figure out exactly what we will offer related to tech-based writing PD — we really need to get some info about research in the field and effectiveness of web-based writing practices. I am going to do some searching on the Pew Internet and American Life site, the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Learning site, and UConn’s New Literacies Research Team site to see what I can come up with. So, my final question for tonight is this — if you have an empirical studies on digital writing in schools that you can point me to before Thursday morning, could you please post them as comments here?

Thanks for hanging in there with me on this post. I appreciate all the comments — both online and F2F — that you, as readers, give me about this blog. It is very encouraging as a teacher and writer.

And, just so you know, I am finally thinking about doing a more formal podcast starting soon as I am currently an intern in the Webcast Academy. Wish me luck!