Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

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!

Last week, I had the opportunity to talk with Susi Elkins, a colleague at MSU that I originally met when I visited her class’s digital portfolio presentation a few summers ago. She plans to develop a critical media literacy professional development session for local teachers, and we talked at length about what might happen in such a session. It has been nearly a week since the discussion, but I will try to capture some of the main ideas here.

First, we talked about what teachers want to get out of a three-hour session. From my experience, they want to find something practical that connects to what they already know and do. Many teachers say, “If I can go to a PD session and come out with one good idea…” So, Susi and discussed what makes a good PD session: a timely and relevant topic, hands-on activities, enough theory and background to situate the work without overloading, and leaving with a strong idea of what to do the next day in the classroom.

We then discussed a number of critical media literacy tasks in which she might have teachers engage. Being a producer at WKAR, she has had numerous experiences that help her think about programming in a way that I, and I imagine most ELA teachers, haven’t thought of. The idea of “expertise” — and what makes someone qualified to talk about something — came up, too, and that is something that I deal with all the time. My answer to that question, especially when working with other teachers, is to acknowledge the collective expertise in the room and to then say that we will be working through things together. You do acknowledge your position as an expert on the content, and their position as teachers. 99 times out of 100, that has worked for me as a professional development leader.

Then, we talked about the good stuff: what is critical media literacy and what would she want her participants to take from the session. My understanding of her goal was two-fold: to engage in discussions about the definition and importance of critical media literacy and to work through a sample lesson on critical media literacy in which the teachers would develop a text from some stock footage that she would bring. I thought that both of these goals seemed appropriate and, given the three hours that she would have to deliver the session, quite ambitious! That said, we discussed many activities that she could do like juxtaposing different takes from different sources on the same story, analyzing the messages in advertisements, and discussing how certain facts, statistics, and polls are employed. All of these strategies would be applicable, we felt, to ELA teachers and hopefully to other content area teachers, too (since her audience might include all subject areas).

We then talked about the production aspect. I suggested that she use JumpCut to have teachers develop competing versions of a single commercial or advertisement based off of the same basic media elements. We also talked about the Educational Video Center (although the name escaped me at the time), and the curriculum that they share in the Teaching Youth Media book. We also discussed Hey Kidz! Buy This Book, a guide for tweens about media literacy. I particularly liked that text when I read it had a great list of propaganda techniques with particular examples so as to make it clear to kids what the different techniques were and how they worked. We talked, too, about possibly using AdBusters. I suggest that Susi might have each teacher use the same media elements and adopt a different technique in the video he or she was creating.

All told, this was a great discussion. I was able to share some ideas that I had about critical media literacy and professional development and Susi gave me some ideas for future collaborations and other resources. In particular, she pointed me to Anastasia Goodstein’s work (this site, YPulse, appears to be her professional blog) as well as “Don’t Buy It” from PBS Kids. I mentioned that it would be great if our digital storytelling camp students this summer could visit the WKAR studio, so that might happen, too. All in all, I enjoyed talking with Susi, and I look forward to future collaborations with her.

Notes from another CCCC session that I found engaging. In this session, the presenter spent a good deal of time thinking about design from the standpoint of a writing teacher, and I found her angle on it informative. In particular, I found her categories of balance, unity, gestalt, and hierarchy a more nuanced way of talking about the Robin Williams principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. I hadn’t really thought about using Homestar Runner for a writing assignment, but now I might.

Here are some notes:

Chandra Lewis-Qualls - “Identity Interface: Rhetorical Analysis, Graphic Design, and Comics”

• Intro
• How is identity created in online comics, analyzing with graphic design theories
• Her subject position: I am a feminist rhetorician interested in visual design and communication, deeply immersed in gaming
• Graphic Design
• Mildred Friedman — “Graphic design is an art form that depends for its efficacy on the degree to which words and images communicate a coherent message.”
• You get the effect of the intent based on what isn’t explicitly evident
• Why Use Graphic Design?
• By focusing on design strategies, we can discern alternate ways to shape idetity online
• Graphic design has a longer history that visual rhetoric and insights from the field could prove valuable
• It opens up conversations between academics and designers
• 1964 “The First Things First Manifesto”
• Graphic design has a long history of critique and wanted to point out the fact that design is not neutral and has value; they were pushing against the consumer and material aspects of graphic design and wanted to share their thoughts on it
• New Media Analysis
• Cheryl Ball has suggested that we need to analyze “the semiotic elements [of new media]“
• New Media critics often look at five major design features and ignores the sub-texts of design
• Graphic Design Components
• Balance — controlling the negative space, creating visual interest
• How are the elements arranged?
• What effect does this have on the composition as a whole?
• Unity — creating harmony with a color, shape, or typeface
• What are the elements that create unity in this piece?
• Gestalt — the combination of elements create an idea or message that isn’t explicit, but is an underlying argument in the design
• What is the opinion underlying the design
• Hierarchy — dominant element in the design of various levels of interest
• How to create interest
• Branding and Identity
• Multiple experience with the product
• Created through advertising, design, and media
• A symbolic embodiment of the product
• Creates associations and expectations
• Includes explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, etc
• Focus on web comics
• Try to create an embodied experience for the characters
• Homestar Runner.com
• Irreverent surreal humor
• Strongbad’s identity
• Types answers to visitors and is very sarcastic
• Using these concepts in class
• How do you visually convey your identity online (ethos)
• Freshmen create a MySpace page
• Upper level students create a digital portfolio to represent their work

In August of 2005, I started blogging on the domain that Steve and I bought to host our now defunct podcast. In October, I posted my thoughts on M.T. Anderson’s book, feed. Soon after, I loaned it to Davin, (who I mention in the post below) and just yesterday he stopped by for a surprise visit to return the book. So, with that in mind, I thought that it was timely to repost this summary of the book from my original blog from way back in the day. You know, like less than two years ago, right? Enjoy!

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Well, this has been an up and down weekend. Another chance to talk with pre-service English teachers on Friday about wikis and the like was followed by work and email until one in the morning that night (sad, but true). Then, Saturday, brought a cool, but comfortable day for Spartan football and, inevitably, a blown chance to go 5-2 on the season. Today was spent largely outside doing yard chores, waiting another weekend for our late-turning leaves to fill dozens of lawn bags. Which brings me to now, and the fact that I feel like I need to write about something engaging and, hopefully, useful, so I can cap off the weekend in a positive manner.

So, I will write a little bit about feed, by M. T. Anderson. And, despite the fact that it isn’t the most positive book in the world, there is plenty that it has to say about our consumer culture, internet technology, and what we really value in life. Perfect fiction for me. Here goes…

My introduction to this text was from a colleague, Ninna Roth, who was using it as a part of the Greenrock High School Writers Retreat a few years ago. She told me that it was, by far, the most incredible book that she had ever read (although, like every English teacher, I think her favorites are constantly changing). At any rate, I let the book linger on my shelf for quite some time and, over the summer, mentioned to my son (now a sixth grader) that a friend told me it was a good book. He was interested, so I passed the book on to him with the intention of reading along with him. Well, he read fast. And, he told me, many times, that this was a book that I might not approve of him reading (more on that soon), although it all worked out in the end, because I read it recently and we had many interesting points of discussion to talk about. A few of them included the peer pressure on teens and the constant desire for them to want. To want things. Objects. People. I could put a whole post up on that aspect of it. But this blog is supposed to focus more on technology, so that is where I will go.

The “feed” referred to in the title of Anderson’s text is an extension of today’s always-on internet that is hard-wired, literally, into a person’s limbic system. The feed is available to use for chatting others, pulling up information, getting directions, playing games, “going mal,” and any number of other types of internet that we would use. Although, in Anderson’s world, the feed is tied into the brain, so there are no glasses to wear, headsets to don; people are hooked up from the word go and can be online, all the time. This, of course, allows for the other pervasive online activity to happen, too—advertising. The feed, through some sophisticated demographic profiling and GPS tracking can, without fail, give information to a person looking at a product on a shelf (or merely driving by a store or having a particular emotion that the product could help offset) better than any salesperson could ever hope to. The co-opting force of the dollar has taken over the feed, the internet, and is what—we find out later—makes the whole system run.

Anderson’s main character, Titus, is a typical teen in this connected world. To make a long story short, he meets up with an anti-establishment type, Violet, and they go through a series of events together that bring them together and push them apart at the same time. She attempts to resist the feed, in all its forms. I won’t spoil the end, but thought that you should know a little more about it before I get back to the technology. Wow, this is an unfocused book review. Sorry.

So, back to the tech aspects of it. First, I was trying to figure out if Anderson was truly prescient in his titling of the book, or if he just got lucky. In 2002, when it came out, I hadn’t heard of feeds, or RSS, and I wonder if many others had either. Although Wikipedia points to 1999 as the year feeds really kicked in, I thought that Anderson was just lucky. Then, I was talking with a friend and colleague at MSU, Davin Granroth, and he politely reminded me that news organizations like AP and UPI have been sending news over the wire, “feeding” it to newspapers and other journalists for years. Thanks, Davin, for pointing that out (and please excuse my ignorance of journalism. Duh.).

At any rate, the fact that Titus, Violet, and their friends can get news, or a definition, or anything else that they want, anytime, is both exciting and disheartening. For instance, I think of the fact that I carry my life around with me on a laptop and a cell phone. It is sad, but true, that if I lost this laptop, I would be doomed (at least somewhat—I did back it up on an external hard drive last week). Or, the fact that I don’t know phone numbers of my closest relatives and friends, I just pull up their name in my cell phone (which is, after all, my only phone). Or, that I have Max OS X’s Dashboard widgets constantly running so I can look things up on Wikipedia like the history of RSS. In fact, I think that these widgets are about the closest thing to begin connected to the feed that I have experienced so far, although certainly blogs and podcasts are right up there, too.

Also exciting, but scary, is the fact that because no one really has to know anything, School (with a big TM behind it) is really just a holding pen for these kids, even more so than today. They don’t really need to know anything, they can look it up on the feed. They don’t really have to have an opinion on anything, the feed provides it for them. They don’t really have to want anything in life, the feed tells they what they should do for fun, for love, for an image. At one point, a character is discouraged by the poverty he saw on a trip to, I believe, Mexico and then he turns to his friends and says how he can’t think about that because it is so depressing. That is bad in and of itself and then Anderson has the feed, of course, kick into this kid’s brain with something fun so he could, indeed, forget about poverty. Wow. Talk about me media.

Now, I am all for digital literacy. No shocker there. But, Anderson’s text raises some interesting points about being online, all the time. I talked with my son about this a little bit and I don’t think that he fully understands the implications of it, yet. Is he online? Sure he is? Is he pervasively online? No, not like me (always looking for wi fi gets old, right?). So, his general response to the text was that this is an interesting take on things, but not a likely future. I am not sure so. Anderson places it, as best I can tell by a historical reference in the text, at about the year 2200. The fact of the matter is that I think many of the things that he talks about are already happening.

Spam clogs email inboxes. Spyware watches us (especially those using IE). Banner ads and Google links fill our screens. The democratization of all things that the web was supposed to lead us to hasn’t quite come to fruition. Yet. Perhaps if Web 2.0 technologies continue to emerge and if teachers understand how to harness and use them in classrooms, then we stand a chance. If not, then the types of pervasive connectivity that Anderson envisions could come to fruition. We don’t want Web 3.0 (or whatever version it is in 2200) to look like this.

One other quick note about the text before moving into a final anecdote. My son was worried that I would be upset about the language that Anderson has his characters use. The f-bomb is omnipresent and just about everything else from the seven words you can’t say on television appears at one point or another. But, he and I were able to engage in an interesting discussion about discourse and the ways in which certain words become acceptable over time and in different contexts. For Anderson, these cussing terms are becoming so ubiquitous now that in another two hundred years we won’t even think about them as have ever been a curse word. There are other words that a character uses that confuse Titus and he doesn’t want to look the words up (although he could, easily). I think that Anderson makes an interesting point about how technology can influence our language, and it is a warning that we, as English teachers, shouldn’t take lightly.

And, for the promised anecdote, this time with my daughter. Tonight, she was on one of her two favorite websites, Nick Jr. (fortunately, PBS Kids is the other). In the time that it took me to get her on the website and leave the room to go run her bathwater, she was able to play two different games and print two pictures that she made (without having either my wife or I in there to show her the print button on the screen or how to turn on the printer!). She’s three and a half, by the way. While producing content (as best a three-year-old can), she also consumed some major advertising for this Nick Jr. show, to be sure, but also the obligatory commercials that they now put right into their site. When you click into certain games, you are hit with 30 second TV spots from their sponsors. Fortunately, Nick Jr. still gives you the option to skip the ad, if you can click fast enough. What is important to me about this, in the end, is the fact that she knows and understands what it means to be online and that we can play her games here, at home, but not when we are up north (and on, at best, a 28K dial-up). Wow.

In the end, it is interesting to note, in light of what feed’s message shares with us, that this is the type of online interactions that she, my son, and all of us may have to face in the future. How do I get around the advertising and the message that the media is portraying about my body image and sense of self in order to do the things that I find important to do online? I hope that we are teaching our students the critical literacy skills to answer those questions and create their own blogs, podcasts, wikis, and digital videos.

And, I hope we know the answer to whether this is the internet of the future well before 2200.

Brian Winn, an Assistant Professor from Comm Arts and one of the directors of the Games for Entertainment and Learning (GEL) Lab, gave a talk on “Serious Games.” Here is part of his bio:

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media, Co-Director of the Games for Entertainment and Learning (GEL) Lab, and a Principal Investigator in the Communication Technology Lab at Michigan State University.

I design, create, and research interactive media design, including game design, digital game-based learning and interactive health communication. My expertise is in designing engaging serious games that balancing learning, pedagogical, and gameplay objectives. My award-winning interactive media work has been presented, exhibited, and experienced around the world.

Notes from the talk, “Making Learning Fun: Getting Serious about Games”

(Note: Check out a recent interview with Brian on the Spartan Podcast site)

• Play, Games, and Learning
• Play as problem solving
• Playing is a form of problem solving used by many animals
• Uniqueness of games
• Imposes formal rules on top of play
• Adds goals and objectives
• Thereby play is structured for a particular purpose
• Merlin Donald, Origins of the Human Mind
• “Human children play rule-governed gaems by imitation, often without any formalized instruction. They invent and learn new games, often without using language.”
• Why do we play?
• Ring around the rosie: Cognitive development: mimicry, coordination, self-awareness, spatial relationships, empathy
• Childhood socialization
• Chess, checkers: mental sport
• Olympics: celebrate athleticism, peace amongst nations
• War games: preparation for war, tactics
• What types of problems are there?
• Survival
• Education
• Business
• Political
• Military
• Health Care
• Science
• Entertainment
• More…
• Why we play digital games”
• You learn something from any game: characters, rules
• But, does the thing that you learn transfer outside of the game world?
• Most digital games attempt to solve the entertainment problem, nothing else
• Serious Games Movement
• Serious games are any game whose chief mission is not entertainment
• They can also be entertainment games reapplied for missions other than entertainment
• Ex: Civilization in the history classroom
• But, why serious games?
• We are all products of our environment
• Baby Boomers: TV, typewrite, memos
• Gen X: Computes, email, early video games
• Gen Y: Web, IM, interactive games
• Games are a way of life for many people: the average 8th grader plays video games 5 hours per week
• Why are we interested in games?
• They are engaging and goal-oriented
• They are challenging and provide rapid feedback, adapting to what the player does as he/she plays
• They build individual expertise
• They have a social aspect to them; most games throughout time have been multi-player games
• The image of the computer game is that we have one player on his/her own computer, bust as networks have grown, so have interactive games
• Humans like to tell stories and games provide a rich context for sharing experiences. Even if they are not in the same game, they can share experiences about that game (player walk throughs, reviews)
• In a typical game:
• Player adopts a character, perceives task to complete tasks, picks up vocabulary, explores and test boundaries, adapts to the game, realigns expectations and judgments through each exploration, reappraising the cause and consequence of their actions.
• Replace “player” with “student” and “game” with “subject matter.”
• But why Serious Games?
• Parallels with progressive pedagogy
• Active, constructivist learning
• Problem-based learning
• “Authentic Professionalism” (Gee) and communities of practice
• Where are serious games being used?
• Education: Higher Ed and Pre-k through 12
• Government: Fire fighter training
• Healthcare: educating someone about how to stay healthy and games for exercise
• NGOs ad corporations
• Case Studies
• Life Preservers
• NSF Funded Game
• Education Goals
• Framed by national science standards for middle-school science
• Evolution, adaptation, and natural history
• Design Goals
• Accurate science vs. fun gameplay
• Appeal to both boys and girls
• Research Goals
• Due to play style differences between genders
• Girls will explore more, boys will just try to win the game
• Girls will learn more than boys from the same learning game
• Mixing science fiction with science fact
• Initially, we were going to try to be completely factual, but to create an engaging experience, we needed to do some science fiction for story, but the science facts come in throughout the game
• Based on the concept of invasive species and how we stop them or what happens once they are in an ecosystem
• Learning objectives: to understand the “tree of life” diagram and interact with it; look at the different aspects of the species and think about the adaptations that went on with each creature.
• Mixes interactive tutorials with mini-lessons, and can be played in one class period
• FFC: The Fantastic Food Challenge
• Developed for the MI Food and Nutrition Program
• Developed to teach low-income adults the knowledge, skills, and confidence to feed their families nutritious meals
• Based on the concept of Yahtzee, you roll and take food items and place them on the food pyramid
• Designed to be a gender-neutral game, and the audience was not familiar with computer technology in general
• Based on our research, the people who played the game learned more than just reading on the website or brochure
• Voyage Beijing
• The idea behind this was to understand culture as important in business communication and negotiation
• Based on the explosion of US business in China and meant to simulate a business person’s first experience going to China
• Sets you up with a role as a manager and lays out the story that you need to go to China to resolve some quality issues in your product development
• Designed as a virtual experience to understand knowledge about China (what is the time zone, can I use the ATM, do they speak English) and you get more “knowledge” experience
• Also, you get “impression” as you interact with people and that can go up and down
• You can create and add to a journal focusing on names, places, and cultural references
• Issues: Practical, Cultural, Design, Research
• Cultural: “Educational” games are not fun, like broccoli dipped in chocolate
• There are few examples of fun educational games and many boring ones (like Math Blaster)
• How do we change perceptions? Can you?
• What is “fun?”
• This is a highly contested question in the sense of the content, the persona designing, the person playing, the relationship this game has to other games, how many players are involved and many other factors.
• Cultural problems
• Clark Aldrich - “I think educational simulations (games) can be fun, but more importantly they must be satisfying.”
• Designing serious games is hard
• Integrating learning into play
• Balancing content, pedagogy, and fun
• Cues from entertainment games
• What is important in terms of learning objectives?
• Knowledge, skills, and attitudes
• You can’t do everything in a game; it is a tool that can be added to a class with a particular, limited set of objectives
• It is hard to make games: design, programming, art, production, content, pedagogy
• Not too many good, easy-to-use, affordable tools: Brian uses Flash and Director mostly
• Games are expensive to make
• Commercial games cost from $1 to $25 million over 1-3 years
• Life Preservers, for instance, was made over six months and on a grant
• Assessing effectiveness
• How do you show learning? Is a score on a game the same as a score on a test?
• Serious games have competition from other forms of media and there are many cultural preconceptions about games that we have to overcome (games are for kids/boys/etc)
• More and more people are beginning to consider games as a way to learn, and the positive value of gaming in education
• Decision makers are not gamers (average age of gamer is 31)
• Gaming is a young “industry”
• “Serious Game Developer” isn’t in the yellow pages
• Resources
• MSU
• gel.msu.edu
• seriousgames.msu.edu
• Web
• www.seriousgames.org
• www.educationarcade.org
• www.gamesforhealth.org
• www.socialimpactgames.com
• www.acm.org/pubs/cie.html
• Books
• Gee
• Aldrich
• Prensky

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.

Tomorrow, I will be working with a colleague’s class of pre-service English teachers. He asked me to “offer this group is a vision or several visions of what is possible regarding technology and writing” and I can think of a few, but there are two rolling around in my mind right now.

First, I return to a post that Will had about a month ago introducing us to Mogopop. I downloaded the software and tried to get it to work, but with the holiday rush, I gave up on it. Well, this weekend I finally got back around to it as I began to think about the talk tomorrow. I am glad that I did. This seems like a simple, yet highly effective and web-based tool for producing multimedia content. Some of the examples on the site are very simple — just pictures in a slideshow, basically — but some of them are really elaborate. Moreover, Mogopop basically allows you to use the “note” feature in a video iPod to create an interactive, hypertextual and multimodal text. In short, it seems to be the most user-friendly multimedia creation tool that I have seen in a long time. Now, I haven’t made my own yet, but the possibilities seem quite engaging, with some examples on their site incorporating public domain and open source content (like all of Poe’s poems) into a Mogopop project. To me, this seems like a natural extension and publication tool for student work created in blogs, wikis, podcasts, and digital stories.

The second thing on my mind is one of Paul’s most recent podcasts: Self-Assessing Blogging. He asks a series of timely questions to his middle school students, all of whom have been blogging all year:

Here are the questions I asked my middle school students to address today.

1. What makes for a really good blog post — one that others want to read and respond to? * Is it something you care about? Is it about something important? * Is there enough writing? Is there too much? What keeps the reader reading? …

He asks many more questions and, in his podcasts, reads a number of students’ answers. One of the main themes? Audience. All of the students addressed the fact that they felt a real sense of audience in their blogging. I know that Paul has been using a blogging matrix to invite his students to write, and from his podcast it sounds as if this intentional scaffolding of student bloggers is paying off.

So, those are the two places that I will probably start talking tomorrow after a little bit of prefacing. I have other sites to show, but these are the things on my mind this weekend and both seem to be pertinent to our discussion tomorrow about visions.

It’s always nice when the vision can be grounded in reality.

OK, if we didn’t have enough of a reason to teach our students that they are, indeed, producers of digital writing — and that this matters as a skill they need to have — this story might be the final straw that convinces educators that we need to take it seriously:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story,one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story aboutcommunity and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s aboutthe cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s aboutthe many wresting power from the few and helping one another fornothing and how that will not only change the world, but also changethe way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We’re ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

TIME.com: You — Yes, You — Are TIME’s Person of the Year — Dec. 25, 2006 — Page 1

With that in mind, it might be a bit early for New Year’s Resolutions, but when YOU are the person of the year, you might want to begin thinking about this early (isn’t it weird to talk about yourself in the second person?). So, here are some of my thoughts about what (digital) writing teachers might consider doing in the next year (if you haven’t already):

• Subscribe to at least five blogs and five podcasts, and read/listen to the regularly.
• Create a wiki. It can be for you, your family, your students, your school. Whatever. Just make one and play around with it.
• Learn how to post photos, videos, slideshows, or some other artifact online and think about other creative things that you can do with it.
• Create a digital story. Even if it is only a few seconds long.
• Learn more about copyright and how you and your students can use Creative Commons to produce your own digital writing.
• Write a document collaboratively.
• Get an avatar in Second Life.
• Talk for free. Heck, talk to lots of other people for free about something interesting to you.
• Get onboard with the open source movement.
  
• Check out other Web 2.0 options.

Well, I am sure there are more, but ten seems like the magic number for these types of lists, so I will stop.

But, I would like to hear from you — what else you might add to a list of digital New Year’s Resolutions? Thanks in advance for your ideas.

Blogged with Flock

Now, here is a great way to kill time and generate cool graphics for your blog:

typoGenerator

Interestingly enough, the warning at the bottom of this image says “the images used for generating may be subject to copyright.”

Also interesting, as soon as I clicked away from the page, the temp image that was stored — and that I tried to blog above — disappeared. Save early, save often, I suppose…

Blogged with Flock

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.