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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Another great session this week, this time with one of the co-authors of the Writing Next report: Steve Graham.

Here is an overview from the MSU LARC site:

Steve Graham, Vanderbilt University

Evidence-Based Practice in Writing – Drawing on Experimental, Qualitative, and Single Subject Design Research for Answers

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
11:30am – 1:00pm
Room 133F Erickson Hall, Michigan State University

This presentation will examine what we know about effective writing instruction, drawing on three recent reviews of the literature. One of the reviews (Writing Next) was a meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental writing intervention research. Another review was a meta-analysis of single-subject design writing intervention research. The third review was a meta-synthesis of qualitative research conducted with outstanding literacy teachers, designed to identify common practices across studies. Advantages and disadvantages to the use of evidence-based practices in writing will also be explored.

About the Speaker:

Steve Graham is the Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education and Literacy, a chair he shares with Karen R. Harris. His research interests include learning disabilities, writing instruction and writing development, and the development of self-regulation. Graham is the editor of Exceptional Children and the former editor of Contemporary Educational Psychology. He is the co-author of the Handbook of Writing Research, Handbook of Learning Disabilities, Writing Better, and Making the Writing Process Work. In 2001, Graham was elected a fellow of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities. He is the recipient of career research awards from the Council for Exceptional Children and Special Education Research Interest Group in the American Educational Research Association.

And, here are some notes from the session:

• Opening quote: “Kids know the most interesting things” - Mark Twain
  • “It hurt, the way your tongue hurts when you accidentally staple it to the wall.”
• Writing is nowhere in terms of the educational reform movement in this country
  • The things that drive the educational reform movement are reading and math
  • Now, STEM - science, technology, engineering/economics,math
  • Why is writing out in the cold?
    • This is not always bad, as it sometimes results in school practices that are not good
    • But, we need to make the case that writing is important
      • 1. One of the reasons that people are not paying attention to writing is that there is a general perception that we do not know how to teach writing. Policy makers want evidence, and they want particular kinds of evidence.
        • We do know that there are some things that work for all students 4-12 and younger
        • People don’t think that writing is important. So, we have to look at the effects of writing on content area learning. We make the case that writing can be helpful in terms of the STEM skills
        • Reading gets more play in the literacy discussion. We need to look at the effects of writing on reading. How does writing affect reading?
          2. What are the practices going on in elementary and secondary schools
          • Limitations: survey data that could be rosy, but the data is still not good
          • ELA teachers are doing less than one extended writing assignment a month
          • You don’t wan to go into policy making without good research to make recommendations

          3. Theoretical framework — from Patricia Alexander from moving from knowledge about discourse and enhancing motivation

• What are three primary resources we can draw from?
  • Professional writers
    • Unfortunately, the advice can be simplistic and only moves confident writers to expert writers; it doesn’t help other writers
  • Effective practices from experienced teachers
    • Talk to effective teachers or observe good teachers in practice and study them
      • Problem: if I go in looking for one thing, I will likely see it (difficult to separate the wheat from the shaft”
      • Problem: Donald Graves and the example that works. Yet, there are times when this doesn’t work.
      • Problem: generalizability. Evidence is often selective.
      • With scientific studies, we collect evidence, presents findings for all participants, replicability, strength of impact — all this leads to something that should be more trustworthy than insight and experience.
• This presentation, thus, will draw on three sources: experimental, single subject, and teacher practice
  • Other criteria:
    • Four replications
    • Converging evidence (the sun, the moon and the stars align)
    • Recommendations based on higher quality studies are superior
      • Process writing has very poor research, so you need to be cautious about this
      • The more studies, the merrier
  • Effect size:
    • .8 is large
    • .5 is moderate
    • .25 is small, but significant
  • Writing Next looks at overall quality of writing
    • Strategy instruction (planning, revising, editing, and regulating the writing process; 20 studies, .82 effect size (particularly helpful for kids who find writing difficult)
      • Don’t just PEE (post, explain, and expect) students need repeated modeling
      • For instance, the STOP strategy (Suspend judgment, Take a side, Organize ideas, Plan more as you go)
    • Teaching Summarization (systematic and explicit teaching of how to summarize texts); 4 studies, ? (missed it) effect size
      • Teach the six rules of summarization
    • Peer assistance (working together to plan draft and revise); 7 studies, .75 effect size
      • Needs to be a structured in a positive way — having students add questions marks and carats in their peers’ papers
    • Setting product goals (specific goals for the written product to be completed); 5 studies, .70 effect size
      • Need to tell students what you expect without limiting them
      • Product goals and revising
    • Word Processing (using word processing); 18 studies, .55 effect size
      • Some are short studies, but some are up to a year
      • Using the technology which is widely available is important, but it is used infrequently in schools or, when it is used, it is only used for final draft/publication
    • Sentence combining (constructing more complex sentences by combining shorter kernel sentences); 5 studies, .5 effect
      • Work on this together with students, then invite them to apply it back in their own writing
    • Process Approach (extended opportunities for writing, student ownership); 21 studies, . 32 effect size
      • Inviting students to engage in planning and revising is good
      • Bad news: the effect size is scattered all over the place
      • Receiving training from NWP is about a .46 effect, and is insignificant if you did not get that training
      • You can do this in a very poor way, and not get a good effect; this is compatible with a strategy approach that makes the writing more visible
    • Pre-Writing (have students engage in activities such as brainstorming; 5 studies, .32 effect
      • STOP strategy, for instance
    • Inquiry (old research); 5 studies, .32 effect
      • No pre-test done, so these studies may underestimate the effect size
        • Example: set a goal, analyze the data, look at specific strategies, and apply what you learned
          • A student in elementary school looking at conflict on the playground
    • Study of Models
      • Examines examples of specific writers and types of text; 6 studies, .25 effect
        • Model from good readings
    • Writing as a Tool for Learning (writing in the content areas); small but positive effect
      • 26 studies, but I think that it is more effective in science and math than ELA and social studies based on the effect sizes that we see
    • Grammar (explicit teaching of grammar); 11 studies, -.32 effect size
      • Quality of writing is not affected by grammar instruction
      • What this traditionally looks like is that you give a definition, example, and then is used in decontextualized works
      • If we expect it, but do not help students use grammar then it will likely not work
        • Take the kernel sentence: Dog bit mailman

      Recommendations for Struggling Writers (teaching handwriting, spelling, and typing to struggling writers — teaching transcription skills towards automaticity), small positive effect

• Single Subject Design Recommendations
  • Explicitly teach students strategies to construct paragraph; strong positive impact
    • Showing parts of a paragraph to the point that students understand the goals of writing a paragraph
  • Explicitly teaching students how to capitalize, punctuate, etc. helped
  • Reinforce positive aspects of students writing — social praise, tangible reinforcement or both as a means to increasing specific writing behaviors (small positive effect)
    • Traditional means of grading papers doesn’t work — “we get more with honey than we do with vinegar”
    • Couldn’t draw the summary effect from this, however
    • Need to move the feedback beyond the specific paper and help the student move forward in his/her writing
  • Self-monitoring (students asked to count how many errors they made); might be effective for some struggling writers
• Individual Teachers
  • Study exceptional teachers and schools
    • Practice had to be applied by the majority of schools or teachers
    • 10 Practices that might make a differences (had to occur in four or more studies)
    • Dedicate time to writing and writing instruction, with writing occuring across the curriculum
      • Get kids in the game of writing
      • Increasing writing by itself is not enough, it also needs to be motivating and give kids tools to be effective
    • Involve students in various forms of writing over time
    • Treat writing as a process
    • Keep students engaged by involving them in thoughtful acticvities such as planning compositions
    • Vary individual, small, and large group instruction
    • Mode, explain, and provide guided assistance when teaching
      • Teachers need to relinquish control
    • Provide just enough supprt so that students can make progress or carry out writing tasks and processes, but encourage students to act in a self-regulated manner as much as possible
    • Be enthusiastic about writing and create a positive environment where students are constantly encouraged to try hard, believe that the skills and strategies that they are learning will help them write well
    • Set high expectations
    • Adapt writing assignments to meet the needs of students
• Caveats
  • We should not order these practices hierarchically in terms of one being more effective thananother
    • Instead we should order them in a way that we see them working well for us
  • The database is thin
  • Just because a practice has been studied, it does not mean that it will be effective for all teachers in all classrooms.
    • Pay attention and see if it works in your classroom, with your students
  • Little data on those students who are most at-risk: ELL, learning disabilities, struggling writers
  • Lack of data on maintenance and generalization
  • Don’t really know best how best to put all of these things together
    • Think about trying to integrate some of these ideas as part of an overall approach rather than try to fit it into an existing approach
  • Teachers’ views on acceptability of these practices will clearly influence their use — this will include the issue of domain specificity
    • If you don’t accept it as a reasonable practice for you in your classroom it will not work
  • Just because a practices is effective in a study or was used by an exceptional teacher does not mean that it will always work
• Questions
  • 6 traits
    • Most studies were pre- and post-tests with no control
    • Look at journal article on Writing Next
    • 6 plus 1 looked pretty good for what was there
  • In-Service
    • When we asked ELA, science, and social studies teachers about how well their program taught them to teach writing, 70% said it was inadequate
    • We also asked about in-service preparation — you personally, school, conferences — ELA said that 70% were adequate, but 30% were inadequate
    • Most science and other content teachers didn’t feel prepared to do so
    • Not doing it at pre-service level because most states do not require a course in teaching writing
  • We have been doing this work for nearly 25 years and we have not delivered our work in terms of learning strategies approach and outreach
    • We have a distribution problem — we are not providing what we know in pre-service and in-service ed
  • A lot of this is very complicated, so we did the best practice book to give something for teachers to look at
    • We need to have support materials showing teachers how to do this — if you can see it, you can do it

My Reflections

In thinking about Dr. Graham’s talk, there are a number of salient points that I want to consider. First, he went over the 11 strategies from Writing Next and, even though there is evidence to show that all these strategies are effective, it is the individual teacher that makes the difference in writing instruction.

Second, he talked about how students can use word processing to write and revise, and that is very effective for their growth as writers; however, most of the opportunities that students have to write with the computer only involve typing in a “final draft” of something else that has been written out beforehand.

Next, he talked about peer editing and how students must be scaffolded into the process of giving feedback; just having them give comments to one another is not enough as they must use the language of writing in that talk.

Finally, he talked about the writing process approach and having an authentic purpose and audience for students should happen more often than what it is. Typically, the audience is only within the classroom walls, and students don’t share beyond their friends. Yet, he described a project in his children’s school in which students shared their work more widely and that it could be a goal for many, although not all of our assignments.

March was like a lion for me… beginning, middle, and end. I wish there was a better excuse, but that’s the long and short of it. Conferences, prepping my portfolio for my annual review, teaching, grading, etc.

OK, enough of that.

My purpose tonight is to just capture some thinking on a presentation that Rob Rozema and I will give at the Bright Ideas Conference this weekend: Social Networking, Teacher Education, and the English Language Arts.

My main contribution to the presentation will be an annotated bibliography of sources on social networking in education. Here is what I have so far and I welcome any insights that you may have to add to this list. Feel free to comment here or jump right in and add something on the wiki:

• Resources by Educators
  • Teachers Teaching Teachers: A weekly webcast that focuses on teaching writing with newer technologies, often related to social networking
    • ELGG Plans: The wiki that these teachers use to collaboratively compose curriculum
    • Youth Voices: The site for these teachers’ high school students
    • Youth Twitter: Another site for these teachers’ students, focused on the idea of microblogging
  • Ning in Education
  • Steve Hargadon’s post about Social Networking in Education on the Infinite Thinking Machine blog
  • Social Networks in Education Wiki
  • Wesley Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog: Fryer blogs regularly about social networking in K-12 schools
    • Fryer’s del.icio.us bookmarks on social networking
• Research, Scholarship, and Policy Briefs
  • danah boyd’s publications: boyd is a scholar from the University of California-Berkeley, who researches social networking
  • Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know about Series: Clear and concise overviews of a number of technologies, including social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr
  • Pew Internet and American Life Project
  • MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Site
• News and Media
  • TechCrunch’s Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Networking
  • PBS’s Frontline: Growing Up Online

Also, I am trying to think about how to discuss the idea of social networking. What I have found with my experiences in using any social technology is that the teacher really is key to making it work. Be it a discussion board, a blog, a wiki, or a social network, if the teacher talks the talk about using technology, yet doesn’t walk the walk, then it is likely that the students won’t follow.

On a related note, I often wonder about our efforts as teachers to adapt technologies that students are using for their own personal purposes and then connecting it to more academic purposes. In what ways does this co-opting of the technology change the use of it, for better and for worse? For instance, in the social network Rob and I set up this semester, I decided not to make it a “requirement” for my ENG 315 class, and I noticed that very few students have been active in the network as an extra curricular activity. What if I had made it a requirement? Would obligatory postings be worthwhile for students? Would the network have grown more in an organic manner, even though I required it to be fertilized?

As I prepare to present this weekend, these thoughts continue to roll around in my head. In some ways, I don’t even know that I consider myself a proficient user of social networks, as I am in a number of Ning, Facebook, and other groups, yet rarely participate in any meaningful way. I am just wondering how the norms of social networking map on to the academic life of a university faculty member, let alone K-12 teachers and students. I know that they can (as the examples above show), but I am still struggling to make it work for my students.

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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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From the Google Reader….

It makes no sense complaining about the decline of the printed word. As it becomes just another medium, we are moving to a kind of multimedia literacy, where capability with print becomes no more important, or useful, than capability with image.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. There is no rule that says that the written word is superior to other forms of media. While some of us are print-oriented and will always remain so, there are people growing up to whom print is of comparatively minor importance.

The vast majority of these people will enter adult life as well educated as the generations before them. But they will rely less on books and newspapers, and more on television and the internet and multimedia.

We are not witnessing the decline of literacy, simply a new type of literacy. It is pointless to make moral judgements about the superiority of one medium over another.

Literacy alive and well in computer age - Perspectives - Opinion - Technology

Graeme Philipson makes a compelling argument for how our culture’s artists such as Doris Lessing and Elton John — both who decry the effects of the internet — need to change their perspectives about literacy in the 21st century. As a topic always on my mind, I found this opinion article a fresh take on the topic, especially the connection that Philipson makes between our thousands of years of oral history that has, only in the past few centuries, become replaced with print. Just because things are changing again doesn’t mean that we are in decline, it simply means that we need to adapt to the change.

This connects with a conversation that I was having yesterday with one of our college’s public relations consultants. She and I were talking about my research interests and how to make “literacy and technology” something newsworthy, and both struggling to find an angle on it. On the one hand, it seems that discussions of technology and literacy should be self evident. Yet, we continue to see school infrastructures and policies, teacher, administrator, and parent attitudes not reflecting a shift in thinking about this, and, as this EdWeek article points out, the fact that what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get treasured.

So, my question today is thinking about how to make technology and literacy — not just tech literacy, but instead the changing nature of literacy — a key part of the conversation that the media reports on with schools. Clearly, when they publish the box scores for the test results, people stand up and pay attention. Without being punitive, are there ways that we, as educators, can engage the media to get the story of technology and literacy shown to the general public in a compelling manner?

To be more concrete, I want the tone of the conversation in the media to change from “Why aren’t students passing the tests” to “Why don’t students have one-to-one access to laptops for use in their daily reading, writing, calculating, observing, predicting, analyzing, etc.?”

Philipson shows us a way to shift the conversation on the opinion page. Can we think about ways to do it on the front page, too?

Blogged with Flock

January has been a busy month for me as I have been coordinating field placements for my ENG 315 students and we have begun exploring the use of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS in our teaching lives. When we began this work a few short weeks ago, only a handful of these pre-service teachers had heard of a wiki or a podcast, fewer still knew about RSS, some had a general idea about blogs, and none of them were thinking about how these tools would translate into the teaching of writing in their classrooms. So, we started slow, and now things are moving along quite well.

The second week, we downloaded Portable Apps, and I explained my rationale for why would use these tools — both because they are free and open source as well as the idea that they need to be able to take their data with them. We also started setting up our blogs, and discussed the Common Craft video on blogs, thinking about implications for our classrooms and personal learning. The third week, we turned our attention to understanding RSS and reading each other’s blogs. This week, we set up our Google Readers, and I am now challenging them to begin using RSS reading in their professional responses.

So far, this process is going fairly smoothly and I do not feel that I am detracting from the “content” of the course by focusing on the technologies. In fact, I feel that they are helping me get some ideas across even better. For instance, it is one thing to encourage them to read each other’s blogs; it is quite another to provide them with a combined feed of everyone in their class and invite them to read, through their Google Reader, everyone’s posts. I will be building in some time for people to read and comment each week, as their reading of other blog posts will help them activate their brains for our class discussions.

Also, I am finding that they are all having “aha” moments as we move forward. Some are seeing connections to other classes an projects, and I think that they are all starting to see the ways in which we can connect with one another. For instance, one student explained how she immediately subscribed to all her friend’s blogs and, while it wasn’t purely academic, that solidified in her mind the power of RSS to gather information. In a time where we take for granted that all of our students understand so much about the web intuitively, it is good to know that we can talk about these technologies in relation to the teaching of writing and that they can begin to see some new connections.

Next up, we will be working with Rob Rozema’s class at GVSU to post our “This I Believe” essays to a Ning social network and get comments across classes. Then, after spring break, digital stories. As we continue on in the semester, I am looking forward sharing more ideas. It is interesting to compare the snapshots of two generations of teachers that I am seeing this semester — the pre-service students and the in-service teachers in Project WRITE — and compare how they are engaging with similar technologies in different ways. I feel as if with the pre-service teachers, they can pick up on the technology quickly once it is introduced, yet the conversations about pedagogy are still emerging. for the in-service teachers, we are able to talk about pedagogy very easily, but only after very thorough discussions of how and why to use the technology.

The differences are clear and makes me even more aware of the generational gap that must be happening as new teachers enter schools. They are very excited about the technology, yet can’t talk about it in pedagogically sophisticated ways. Veteran teachers are, as they should be, very concerned about pedagogy. This dichotomy makes me wonder how we can get everyone speaking the same language and beginning to think more about the pedagogy and the technology at the same time, regardless of age or experience. Then, we need to layer in discussions of literacy for everyone, because those are not present yet.

More teaching to be done, for sure and it is a great deal of fun in additional to a continual pedagogical challenge.

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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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Yesterday, our RCWP Project WRITE team had the good fortune of being able to work with NWP’s Director of Research and Evaluation, Paul LeMahieu, on an analytic writing continuum workshop. In his talk, which was similar to the session that I attended last summer, he talked about how the continuum has been developed, the pedagogical uses of it, and how we, as professionals who teach writing, need to not just tell those who value tests to “stop,” but to also offer them something better to use instead (we hope to post some notes on the session soon on the Project WRITE wiki).

Particularly useful for the Project WRITE teachers, as he talked about the different categories for assessment on the continuum (content, structure, stance, diction, sentence fluency, and conventions — modeled, with permission, after six traits), he also talked about how this structure of assessment works for most kinds of writing, but not all and not the least of which is multimodal writing. He mentioned how there are not really any models that explore how to assess multimodal composition and how, perhaps, we could develop one through this work in Project WRITE. That is a very exciting component of this project that I had not anticipated when we originally started, and I look forward to pursuing it more soon. (NOTE: I do think that Bernajean Porter has got our thinking moving in this direction for K-12 students, and put up some good criteria and an interactive rubric maker on her Digitales Evaluation site.)

Coincidentally, I have been chewing on this idea now for the past few days as I was trying to help my students in ENG 201 come up with criteria for evaluating their final multimodal projects. As I asked them to reflect on what they have been doing and how they have been working over the past few weeks on these projects, we talked on Tuesday about how the categories of the analytic continuum (which we have been using all semester) just didn’t quite line up with what they were thinking about in terms of what to earn a grade on. Along with some criteria for judging group member performance, they went back to our discussions earlier this semester about rhetoric, and we came up with the following ideas for grading this project:

• Ethos: the credibility of the author is established through professional language, use of appropriate sources, and evidence of author’s perspective (within or in addition to the main multimodal documents)
• Pathos: the texts make appropriate emotional appeals that both engage the reader and provide insight into the chosen topic
• Logos: the texts present a clear and coherent central idea, supported with appropriate evidence and argumentative strategies
• Content and Structure: the choice of mode and media support the message in the texts and elements of multimedia are thoughtfully integrated into the project rather than as a gratuitous add-on
• Design: the choice of design principles (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity) as well as rhetorical decisions (transitions, word choice, stance) combine to make an attractive and effective presentation

So, it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Students, in groups, will be assessing the other groups’ work and I will be throwing in my grade with the whole bunch to get an average. I haven’t graded anything multimodal yet, let alone a collaborative grading where students are involved in the process. I’ll write more about it once we are done, and look forward to hearing your ideas about how you are teaching and assessing multimodal writing, as well as any resources that you can point to about this messy, yet engaging, component of the writing process.

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Today, I had the chance to attend an educational technology session at MSU featuring Nicole Ellison, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies & Media, MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences, and Leigh Graves Wolf, Learning Technology and Culture Programs, MSU College of Education. Their topic is “Educational Blogging: What, Where, Why and How.” Here are some notes from the session:

• What is educational blogging?
  • Blogging in educational settings: in the classroom, between department members, intra- and inter-university research collaboration
  • We will focus on cases where students maintain blogs as part of their coursework
  • Pew research: 8% of internet users maintain a blog, 39% of internet users read blogs, 57% of bloggers are younger
• Why blogs and education?
  • Not much work that makes causal claims about how blogs impact education, but that is difficult
  • Focus on critical skill of writing
  • Encourages students to engage with positions divergent from their own
  • Students are invests because their is a larger audience
  • Increases digital literacy
  • Supports peer-to-peer learning and student-to-instructor knowledge sharing
  • Learning becomes less bound by time and space
• Where to blog?
  • ANGEL — they are protected, but no RSS
  • On your own server — college is in control of the content and can protect it with complete administrative control
  • Edublogs, Blogger, WordPress — differing levels of administrative rights
  • MicroBlogs: Twitter and Facebook
• What: An educational blogging case study
  • What are the differences among students’ perceptions regarding the educational beenfit of writing a blog entry vs. reading other students’ blogs vs. reading other students’ comments?
  • What are student perceptions of the experience of blogging as an educational activity?
  • Overall perceptions:
    • A new experience and uniquely engaging in ways that traditional papers are not
    • Encouraged a less formal writing voice. potentially eliciting a more authentic writing style
    • Exposed students to different perspective; surprised by range of responses
    • They felt it was most useful to read other people’s blogs
    • “I liked the fact that we had to comment on others blogs. It’s cool to get some feedback on what I’ve written.”
    • ” I felt it was really cool when one of the people actually cited what I said in my blog on someone else’s blog.”
    • “It taught be some things that I didn’t pay much attention to before. It was cool because i was able to see what students thought about things we typically wouldn’t talk about in class.”
    • “[comments] are nice to see when the person really puts thought into them, and sometimes make me think and want to write more.”
    • I think it is more effective using the WWW because anyone can view it and we saw that when Ryan’s blog was commented on by the actual author of the piece that we read.”
• What: Commenting
  • Not all students saw benefits of reading others’ blogs or comments
  • Uncomfortable giving critical feedback: “Some people didn’t even write what they were supposed to. Plus, I don’t really know how to respond to other people’s ideas, I don’t want to tell them that they are wrong or anything like that.”
  • Technical problems
  • I didn’t give them lots of guidance on how to provide comments, so I would do that differently
• What: Implications for Practice
  • Students are going to come in with a notion of what blogging is, and students may need guidance on how to reconcile their notions of blogging with the classroom context
  • In some cases, encourage use of pseudonym since this content (if public) will be archived for years to come
  • Consider technical implementation
  • Students need guidance on providing constructive criticism
• What: Enthusiastic, yet wary and ambivalent
  • Enjoyed reading others’ blogs
  • Expands thinking
  • Didn’t want to sound preachy and start arguments
• How to blog
  • Different Use Models
    • One to many: From the teacher as a posting to students; from the student to others
      • Provide feedback to a presenter on his/her blog
    • Many to many (class blogs)
      • People can become experts in one area
    • Many to one (RSS aggregation)
      • Use Google Reader to read all of my students’ blogs
    • Experimental Writing
      • Creating an “academic” writing in blogging environment — posts within the blog are tagged and connected as well as external links (Leigh’s example)
    • Issues
      • Anonymous blogging
      • FERPA concerns
      • Intellectual property
    • Other tools
      • Scribefire for Firefox
      • Feed to Javascript - create an HTML page with feeds
      • Google Reader
      • Blogger for Word
  • How: Assessment
    • Grade for content or completion?
    • Require a set number of posts?
    • Specify timing of posts throughout semester?
    • Require comments and feedback?
    • Need to back up posts
  • How: Practical Advice
    • Blog yourelf
    • Start small
    • Subscribe to RSS feeds
    • Read other educator blogs
    • Virtual University
    • Blogs for Learning

The month of August has brought a number of transitions, not the least of which is that I begin teaching at CMU next week. There are two courses that I will be doing this fall; one is a writing methods course for K-8 pre-service teachers and the other an intermediate composition course. More on composition next week, but for now I thought that I would post some of my thinking about writing methods as I created my syllabus.

I must say that sections of this intro to the course are taken from my department chair, Marcy Taylor’s syllabus, but I have added a few things. I forgot how much a syllabus can, in a sense, be a teaching philosophy of sorts, and I really enjoyed crafting this introductory part of the document. In my next post (and once I have the assignment refined a little more), I will post what I plan to call the “Educational Contexts Multigenre Research Project.” For now, here are some of my thoughts on writing and teaching writing, as represented in my syllabus  for this fall’s class.

Course Overview
In “The Neglected ‘R’: The Need for a Writing Revolution,” the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges begin their report by claiming that

Writing is how students connect the dots in their knowledge. Although many models of effective ways to teach writing exist, both the teaching and practice of writing are increasingly shortchanged throughout the school and college years. (2003, p. 6)

Given this national context, we will explore models of teaching writing while attempting to understand why and how writing is being “shortchanged” in our schools. A complex task, teaching writing requires that we understand why and how people choose to write, what methods are appropriate in certain situations, how social-cultural and cognitive factors play into individual writing processes, and the effects of newer technologies and multiple literacies on what constitutes “good” writing instruction.

Good writing instruction requires more than following a textbook. A trusted scholar and practitioner, Lucy Calkins offers a vision for what it means to be a teacher of writing:

If our teaching is to be an art, we must draw from all we know, feel and believe in order to create something beautiful.  To teach well, we do not need more techniques and strategies as much as we need a vision of what is essential.  It is not the number of good ideas that turns our work into art but the selection, balance and design of those ideas. (1994, p. 3)

Thus, this course is designed to help you make wise decisions about the “selection, balance and design” of writing in your elementary-level classrooms. Think of it as a workshop; the emphasis will be on creating and critiquing ideas about writing pedagogy through a hands-on approach. It is designed to focus on five basic areas of preparation:  your own writing; reading and discussion; working with children in the classroom; creating teaching materials; and written reflection on the first four.

Methods courses can never be only about “methods” or lesson planning alone. Many students expect to get a “bag of tricks” or “set of strategies” from the class that they can simply take and use directly as lessons in their classrooms. This is reasonable. Because you are anxious to get out and have your own classroom, I can understand why you may be impatient with what you see as theory or “busy work.” My goal is that you come to realize is that “theory” is all you have with which to filter the events of the classroom; you won’t know what to do completely until you get there. Think of this class as offering a theory, an approach, to writing instruction, one that will define writing and literacy in a broad manner.

For that definition, we turn to Anstey and Bull who offer us a vision of what literacy pedagogy, when deeply and critically theorized, can look like:

[L]iteracy pedagogy must teach students to be flexible, tolerant of different viewpoints, and able to problem solve, analyse situations, and work strategically. They must be able to identify the knowledge and resources they have and combine and recombine them to suit the particular purpose and context. Consequently, school classrooms and teachers’ pedagogy must encourage, model, and reflect these sorts of behaviours. The content and pedagogy of literacy programs must reflect the literate practices of local to global communities and equip students for change. Educators cannot hope to teach students all they need to know, as this will change constantly. But teachers can equip their students with the knowledge, skills, strategies, and attitudes that will enable them to meet new situations and cope with them. (2006, p. 18)

No small task, indeed. Learning how to teach writing may involve unlearning how you were taught writing. It may challenge your conceptions of what a “good” writer is and should be able to do. Thus, the focus of this course will be on practicing the strategies of a writing workshop approach as filtered through the multiple lenses of curriculum and pedagogy, practice and theory. This applies to both traditional written texts (e.g., stories, essays, and poems) and those composed with newer technologies and in multiple media (e.g., hypertexts, audio, video, and other multimedia).

One of the most fundamental tenets that scholars in our field argue is that teachers of writing need also to be writers. It is my goal as your teacher to help you become both a better writer and teacher of writing in different genres, for different purposes, and across various audiences. By the end of the course, you will believe the mantra, “I am a writer.”
References

• Anstey, M., & Bull, G. (2006). Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies. Newark, Del.: International Reading Association.
• Calkins, Lucy. The Art of Teaching Writing. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994.
• National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges. (2003). The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution. Available: www.writingcommission.org/prod_downloads/writingcom/neglectedr.pdf