Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Hi Bonnie and Tech Team Members:

Thanks for linking to my post on comics — Rick amd Mitch are doing some great work on that for RCWP.

It looks like you had a great meeting yesterday and I am glad to know that you are using Comic Life in your work. Good luck planning the PD!

Troy

Hey GEEK!ED! Crew,

You mentioned that you are looking for programs that are doing Chinese in one of your recent podcasts — there is one right up the road from you in Lansing that is being created in collaboration with MSU. Check it out at:

http://postoak.lansingschools.net/chinese.html

… then this group of students exemplifies what community can be.

Brian Crosby and his students have begun video conferencing with a homebound student using a laptop with a web cam and Skype. Just today, I was talking with a group of academic advisers about how they could connect with their students via Skype, and this example goes to show that these technologies — ones that just a few years ago were cost-prohibitive or extremely difficult to use — are fundamentally changing the ways that we read, write, and interact with one another.

Congrats to Mr. Crosby, his students, and his administration for allowing them the opportunity to use Skype in this way. I look forward to hearing about how they use other read/write tools to stay in touch with Celeste.

The link to this video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” has been the hit of the day on a number of listservs that I am on. Watch it, and you will see why.

So, Kevin tagged me yesterday, and now I am doing a little self-disclosure. Well, here goes:

1. In high school, I played the trombone and I was the drum major of the marching band for two years. Geeky!
2. To continue my love of marching band, and perhaps of geeky-ness, I was a four-year member of the Spartan Marching Band.
3. I am getting very close to finishing my dissertation, “From Pixels to Praxis: Engaging Teachers in Technology Learning through the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies,” although when my wife asked me just today if I plan to walk in the May graduation ceremonies, I began to panic. I sense “geek” as a theme for this list.
4. I have three kids. Ages: 13, nearly 5, and 18 months. This is giving me a very broad perspective on what it means to be a parent — still cool to two of them and extra-geeky to the other.
5. I love Legos. So much so that I have nearly all of the Star Wars Lego Collection (but I got mad when they began to reissue some sets with slightly different designs and/or characters, so I gave up on it after getting everything from Episode 3). And, yes, my kids think that this is geeky, too.

Thanks, Kevin, for tagging me, and to Maria for sharing, too.

Here are my five tags, all RCWP colleagues:

• Andrea
• Aram
• Cherice
• Julie
• Mitch

Although I wasn’t really able to join the conversation tonight through Skype, the Teachers Teaching Teachers crew asked a great question tonight:

Do our blogs have a student-sponsored life of their own? Have our blog sites moved beyond Fisher’s “new literacy practices as sugar” to allowing students to “combine their concerns and self interest with the common good?” Sometimes, and it remains a goal to make our elgg spaces — our students blogs in social networking sites — into places online where they can truly express, question, explore and research subjects that matter to them.

Teachers Teaching Teachers

One of the ideas that I wanted to take up in this conversation was that of genre. It seems to me that Paul, Susan, Teb, and the rest of the TTT crew are getting at the idea that blogging and social networking could be seen as appropriating online teen culture, as Clarence Fisher seems to be arguing here. I feel that blogging, social networking, and podcasting don’t so much appropriate teen culture as they represent new genres and, because of that, the ways that we think about teaching them in school matter a great deal as to how much, if at all, students learn how to utilize these genres.

In thinking about teaching new media genres, then, I want to share a quick example of how this is, perhaps, a very difficult concept to even wrap one’s head around, let alone teach, if you are not a part of the edublogger community. I had the good fortune of working with a class of pre-service teachers the other day, and we were talking about new literacies and technologies. One section of the article that we read discussed the five-paragraph essay as the typical model of school literacy and how technology threatens to change that genre. This caused a great deal of discontent. Suffice it to say that the pre-service teachers with whom I work came up with a question that essentially boiled down to this: if not a five-paragraph essay, then what else instead? I was taught the five-paragraph essay, I succeeded, I know that kids need to know it (or, at least that is what I believe because I haven’t seen convincing evidence to the contradict my own personal experience), and that is what I will teach them. It is a hard cycle to break.

So, how are blogging, wikiing, podcasting, and other new media writing — and the genres that they enable — different? Paul wrote extensively about what blogging can be in the TTT post, so I won’t reiterate it here. What I do want to say, however, is that I think we need to help our colleagues and those that we mentor to understand how writing on a blog or wiki, or creating a podcast, is still writing at its core (creating a text for a specific purpose and audience), but the affordances of the media and the genres that you can create with that media are very different from what we have traditionally conceived as writing. We can move beyond the five-paragraph essay because we can now talk about — and in compelling new media deliver — texts like we never have before. I don’t think we can give up the old genres, but we also have to think about how to compose with the new ones, too.

Do I want to see students’ five-paragraph essays on a blog? No. But, I think that we need to help our colleague envision what is possible in these new media. Is that appropriation? I don’t think it is. If we ask students to collaboratively write with a wiki and only one student does all the work, then we are reinscribing all the bad practices of that genre for teaching writing. Appropriation gone bad. If we ask students to post a book report to a blog and then offer feedback to others, not allowing for uses of hypertext and the natural conversations that will bubble up, then we are reinscribing all the bad practices of that genre, too. Appropriation gone bad, again.

Instead, we need to help teachers see the potentials of these new media and the genres they allow. Then we won’t need to worry about appropriating. We will need to think more about invention, discovery, and creativity, traits that we would wish on all our writers.

Both Kevin and Leigh mourn the loss of Writely, too.

Kevin notes “poor Troy designed his blog banner by using the Writely interface as his design template.” Indeed! Who would have thought that merely a few months into using a tool like Writely the screen shot that I turned into a banner would be so significant.

Kevin also notes the Google/You Tube deal which overshadowed the whole change from Writely to Google docs. Part of what makes this so depressing for me, when you look at the Google business strategy (and how it reflects our culture at large) is that You Tube — full of interesting things, for sure, but also full of copyright violations and other nasty stuff — gets bought for a billion and a half dollars. Writely, a collaborative tool that has major implications for how we compose and revise texts, barely gets a sniff anywhere, let alone in the news media. What this tells me is that the ability to rip content off a Tivo and post it to YouTube is more important than creating new material in a collaborative fashion.

I generalize and perhaps overstate this a little bit (OK, quite a bit), but the simple fact for me remains that YouTube (for most users) is still a passive media, despite the very original content that some folks are posting there. Writely, on the other hand, invites collaboration from the get go, and it seems as though the implicit affordances and limitations of each tool are being ignored in the larger conversation about how and why we want to write new media for the web.

Oh well, the Google Docs still work, and eventually will probably work even better, so I can’t complain too much. Maybe it will have a presentation tool coming soon?

More importantly, there are other things to look forward to here, namely the K12 Online Conference next week.

Steve asks, “can you think of any examples of representations of “scientific method” in popular media?”

I am not often on the look out for this, let alone watching TV, so I am sure that there are some examples that are embedded in shows other than CSI that have implications for you.

However, the one show that does come to mind is Zoom, and the daily experiment that they do. I don’t know if this is similar to something like Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye the Science Guy in terms of framing the scientific concept, but it might be a place to start in terms of current popular culture.

One other thing that you might think about are movies, although I don’t know if ones like Weird Science would count.

Hi Chris,

I just wanted to touch base with you about your Teach with Tech podcast. I have been listening for a few months and I appreciate how you discuss new technologies and contextualize them in K-12 and higher ed applications.

Just a quick comment on your Opera segment from last month. I have been an Opera user for a few years (yes, I paid for it a long time ago, before Opera 9, because I thought it was that good). Besides all the great tips that you gave (I didn’t even realize the one about the trashcan), you might also want to think about telling your faculty and students that there are some handy mouse features that you can use on a PC or Mac (if you have a 2 button mouse).

• Want more info about a word or phrase on a page that you are viewing? Highlight it, then right click and select one of the many search features.
• Want to email someone, but you aren’t using Opera as your email client? Right click on the email address, copy it, and paste it in your email client.
• Want to navigate web pages faster? Use mouse gestures.
• Got a URL that you have copied or a word that you want to copy from somewhere and search using Opera? Right click in the address box or search box and choose “paste and go” to effectively paste and hit enter at the same time.

There are more mouse tools that I am sure are out there that I don’t even know, but these — along with the tips you offered — make my browsing life much easier.

Finally, I did want to say that I am becoming a regular wiki user. You can see how we used wikis in a similar manner to the teacher you described who asks students to keep class notes by looking at the collaborative agendas from our series of summer workshops. Also, a colleague and I are developing a presentation that we will give in October using a wiki.

For a future episode, I hope that you might consider talking about how teachers are integrating tools of the read/write web into the research process. Gone are the days of 3×5 cards, and now we have webquests, RSS for news feeds, Google Notebook, Citation Machine, Writely, and other tools for keeping track of research online as you write. I would like to hear the ways in which teachers are doing this kind of new research with students.

Keep up the great work on the Teach with Tech podcast!

Troy

Bud,

I, too, have been listening to GEEK!ED!, and found the discussion with David Warlick engaging. Sometimes they seem right on target, sometimes they veer, but it is generally a good show. I appreciate their humor, but when they really start to laugh, it can hurt the eardrums!

Abject Learning is a blog by Brian Lamb that I just ran across that has some insightful commentary, most recently about the video game article in Harpers.

Thanks for coordinating this K12 Online Conference. I am looking forward to it.

Troy