Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Earlier this month, one of my students, Lynette Seitz, and I were interviewed by Heather Smith, CMU’s Assistant Director of Media Relations about technology literacy and our work in ENG 315 this semester.

I appreciate her invitation to record this podcast and it was wonderful to have Lynette’s voice in there, too, as a pre-service teacher who is thinking about incorporating digital writing into her classroom.

You can get the podcast through CMU’s channel in iTunes.

Notes from Randy Bomer’s keynote at MRA 2008:

“Writing Transformations: How New Literacies and New Times Invite Us to Rethink Composition”

• Literacy is changing, literacy as design
• Obstacles: accountability measures and deficit thinking
  • If we are constantly trying to fill in gaps, we are not moving into the future. Looking at education from a deficit model results in damaging education.
  • You cannot move toward the future from a deficit model
• Spotting deficit thinking
  • “these kids”
  • “s/h/they have no language/culture/experience
  • “culture of poverty”
  • finger-wagging to parents
    • Varieties in deficit thinking
      • Individual ability/genetics
      • Culture
      • Poverty
      • Language
      • Mass and popular culture
  • Examples
    • Paying kids in NYC for grades to “compete” with what they could earn on the street
    • Motives for teaching that see children as coming from deficient lives
    • See the book: The Evolution of Deficit Thinking edited by Richard Valencia
  • New literacies are not just about machines.
    • Texts call attention to how they are made, how they work materially, and why
    • Thinking about the design of text and interaction with it
    • Spencer Schaffner’s “five paragraph essay” picture (can’t find image online yet, here is his blog)
    • Habits of minds and material
  • Design
    • Example 1
    • Bill Harvey Music
  • Design as a literacy practice
    • Two phases of the writing process:
      • Generating writing in the notebook — used design as a way of thinking about content
      • Publishing — used design as a way to think about how to publish their work
    • Examples of student work
      • Map of the zoo with narrative annotations
      • Story that was drawn out into a graphic novel/comic page, and by drawing was able to add more detail
        • Bomer claimed that the students wrote more on the days that they drew, and students generated more by working in two modalities
      • Brought in pictures and used cropping Ls
      • Transferred pictures that were cropped and focused in on small components
        • Mother’s image from one image
        • Necklace from another
      • Texts in new literacies may be single pieces that are loosely joined
      • Making Journals by Hand by Jason Thompson or Memory Keepsakes or Artists Journal Sketches by Lynne Perella
      • Design Decisions
        • What pathways are the readers going to take?
          • Box, journal, notecards

Rather than see these children and what they could do from a deficit model, we enabled them to produce texts that mattered to them and developed new literacy practices.

Reflections:

As Bomer talked, I appreciated his perspective on new literacies as “avoiding the deficit” model of thinking. This adds a new twist to the discussions of new literacies that I have been reading about recently, both because it honors the socio-cultural perspective that NLS has developed over time and also addresses issues about about accountability and assessment by hitting it head on by using the research on deficit thinking to support the idea that approaching literacy in reductive ways really contributes to poor literacy practices.

Sorry that it took so long, but getting back to another crazy week finds me now, on the Friday might before MRA 2008, catching up on SITE.

That said, I have one final set of notes and reflections, and this keynote was a good one. Dr. Antonio Battro, the Chief Education Officer for One Laptop Per Child delivered an excellent keynote address and post-keynote discussion. Highlights from both are here, followed by my reflections.

Also, FYI, I have update my presentation post from a few days ago, and it now includes a podcast of my session.

Here are the notes from the keynote, followed by notes from the post-keynote discussion, and, finally, my reflections:

The Cognitive Challenges of the One Laptop Per Child Program
Antonio Battro, Chief Education Officer One Laptop Per Child

• OLPC (and per teacher)
  • Sharing knowledge is a dialogue, and this is the essence of OLPC
  • The machines may change, but education must evolve
• History
  • Nicholas Negroponte
    • 1960’s architecture of the machine
    • In Paris, Battro spent some time with him and in the early 80’s began thinking about deploying machines in remote countries
• Five OLPC Principles
  • Child ownership
    • This is the key, as the child and the teacher own the computers and they are given to them as a gift
    • It is difficult to understand for many ministers of education, because they want the school to own the computer — not the child or teacher
    • When we go to the highest levels of the governments that we work with, this is the first obstacle that we have to overcome
    • Uruguay is the first country to adopt OLPC for the entire country, and the machine was produced in Shanghai
      • The machines arrived during the last week of classes in November and there was discussion about what to do
        • One group said that we should give the machines to the teachers with a workshop and when classes start again in March, the kids can get them
        • Another group said that this is not the OLPC idea — we should give the machines to the children tomorrow (and this is what happened)
        • 10,000 students received the machine
        • Doing research on children and teachers who get the machine with no formal training (this is the last time that this will happen since all the children will have machines next year)
  • Low ages
    • In many countries, the idea of having digital skills is meant for adolescents and older students
    • For OLPC, kindergarten is too late and we have designed a machine that is for early ages
    • The interface is adapted very well for a child even before they learn how to read and write
    • Uruguay is starting in kindergarten because they have seen so much success with the 5 and 6 year old children
    • This motivation to start early came from Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert
      • In about 1960, Seymour Papert said that all children will eventually have a computer
      • This was a crazy idea, but he was a prophet (he developed Logo)
    • Piaget
      • Constructionism (how the child constructs reality)
        • Learning to learn
        • Children teach — this was a very profound idea, too
          • At five years old, children are very good teachers and OLPC will have millions of teachers around the world
    • Howard Gardner
      • Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century
        • The human mind has evolved a number of separate organs/information-processing devices
        • Taking human differences seriously lies at the heart of the multiple intelligences perspective
          • We do a different kind of construction for each intelligence
            • Digital intelligence (”the click option”)
              • Everything boils down to a simple question: to click or not to click
            • What happens when a child makes a mental calculation (Hideaki Koizumi, 2006)
              • The frontal lobe is activated by mental arithmetic
              • The frontal lobe is not activated when using a calculator
                • So, what could it being doing instead?
                • His dream is to write a book with Hideaki Koizumi about the activation of the human brain when teaching
                • Knowing that someone else doesn’t know something and then teaching it — this is an amazing human capacity, and children can do this
  • Saturation
    • Every child has a machine and it is like a vaccination
      • Once you have good trials, you have the obligation to vaccinate everyone or else the vaccine will not work
        • This idea was presented by Jonah Salk (correct name?)
      • We prefer to have a whole town or region saturated
        • One example: in a setting with all the ministers of a country where he took at picture
  • Connection
    • Ability to connect with other users
    • The computer is not a tool, it is an environment
  • Free and open source
    • Multiple languages for the machine
    • 100 books for the machine
• Conclusion
  • Our approach has moved from education for the few and privileged (image of Greek forum) to one computer for all the children (image of a girl with the machine balanced on her head)
  • This is hope, justice, and peace
• Questions and Answers
  • How might this affect countries that are not democratic?
    • OLPC is non-profit and incorporated in the USA
    • OLPC will go everywhere and try to join the education efforts in the country that we work with
      • Some places need an extra push
      • We are teachers without borders and many of our people are volunteers
    • Peru — putting machines in the most remote areas of the country
  • Bill Gates idea that technology will not solve the problems — we need teachers and electricity. How do you respond to this?
    • Battro discussed his experience as a medical doctor and the eradication of disease (saturation)
    • Also, OLPC is not about machines; instead it is about education (we must have water AND education — education today is about having a computer)
      • If you introduce the computer as a technical, colonial invention, then you are reducing education
      • Education has a value in and of itself, not just as a tool
      • In many difficult places today, there are lots of struggles but the governments are willing to give the computers out

Post-Keynote Discussion

• Security — some people are worried that the laptops will be stolen and used for illicit purposes
  • Response — the machine isn’t “on the market,” so it doesn’t have a price
  • Also, if it is lost, it can be permanently disabled from afar
  • Finally, the communities that have these laptops know that they are for the children. If adults have them, and they are are not teachers, then it is likely stolen
• Maintenance — worries about fixing the machines in remote spots
  • Response — easy to open and repair, if it can’t be done at school it can be mailed
  • Eventually, it would be great if people could just take their laptops to any post office and, like other items like keys, they would automatically be sent in for repair and then back to the child
• Student Use — what is happening for teachers training to support student use?
  • Rapid deployment of laptops and teachers are changing pedagogy quickly, too
  • Teachers are moving from classroom to classroom to see new practices
• School Architecture — how do the laptops affect this?
  • Changing from desks and rows to tables and chairs in South America

  Printers — why can’t they print easily?

  • Printers are disruptive, ink is expensive, and it encourages old ways of production and transmission of information (worksheets)
• Support — how can educators help?
  • Need more than just money from big corporations. Family, teachers, and students can use the machines for authentic purposes (USB plug in monitors and probes)
• Education — there is a consensus that we need to change, but we are working with public funds. Also, many governments see teachers as obstacles, but we see them learning with the students. Teachers are our best collaborators. If all kids have the machine, then they are going to use it all the time. Saturation of laptops is the medical equivalent of vaccination.
• Concluding comments — this is a project not about laptops, but about students and teachers.

Reflections

The juxtaposition of us, as educators concerned about social justice and equitable access, sitting in the cavernous conference hall of a casino on the strip in Las Vegas did not elude me. Here we were, with our $1000 (or $2000 or $3000 laptops), writing from America’s heart of conspicuous consumption about how “little green machines” are working around the world to empower youth as producers of knowledge, media, and culture. In a town where one is inundated by only a few views of what counts as culture, we had to buy into that part of the illusion to be able to sit in the room with an educator who is, literally, changing the world from a grassroots level.

Dr. Battro, as both an MD and PhD, shared a unique perspective with us on why the laptops have to be in the hands of every child. What public health officials understand about vaccinations are that they are not helpful at all unless everyone gets them. In that sense, it would not serve to only give laptops to some children, or to stop after this initial roll out is complete. This program is designed to be sustainable, a educational inoculation for generations to come.

My question for him was about the imminent release of Windows XP for the laptop. His response: it doesn’t matter to me. In other words, it really is about the literacies enable by the machine, not the particular tools. I will be interested in seeing how that plays out, especially if XP goes open source.

Well, there was a lot of information from that session. Even as I reread it a week later and half a continent away, on the cusp of another conference, I am still intrigued by the core message that this is not a laptop initiative, it is an educational initiative. This can not be underestimated and gives me pause to think about the ways that I continue to frame discussions of technology and literacy, and reminds me that I need to play with my own children as they teach me about their laptops.

It is just barely spring break here (well, break at least, if not spring) and I am already turning my attention somewhat to the fall. I have been asked to adapt two existing CMU courses into ones focusing on digital writing. Here is what I have come up with so far:

ENG 460 - Current Issues in English: 21st Century Literacies

The study of English continues to evolve in the twenty-first century, based on changes in information communication technologies and the underlying social relations that they allow. Students in this course will explore print, oral, visual, digital, and critical literacies such as blogging, social networking, web-based collaborative writing, and multimedia authoring in relation to their own inquiry projects.

For this course, the main goal seems to be that students create a final research project, a capstone to their English major. So, I hope to attract students who are moderately interested in technology so that we can hit the ground running. I imagine that this group would go through many of the same steps that I am going through with my ENG 315 students this spring (starting a blog, wiki, and social network) and that they would quickly organize themselves around affinity groups. I would take special care to teach them about tools that would be useful in researching (social bookmarking, Zotero, Google Notebook, Scribe Fire) and the topics would largely remain their own, although I am sure that they would be influenced somewhat by the readings and technologies.

I am not sure what to use as a reading collection for this course (or the one below, for that matter). Right now, I am leaning towards only using open access journals and other web resources. Somehow, I want to use the MacArthur series on digital learning, although that could come in to play more in the other course.

Also, the main goal for students is to develop a quality research project, and I would act as a coach for that project. Thus, I need to think about a book that talks about research, yet in a way that makes it engaging and interesting. Right now, I am leaning towards The Craft of Research, although I don’t know if that is too “grad studentish” and if their might be something better for advanced undergrads.

ENG 402 - Rhetoric and Argumentation: Digital Rhetoric

By examining the histories, communities, and designs of digital spaces, this course will relate the rhetorical tradition of argumentation to contemporary rhetorics enabled by information communication technologies. Students will develop multimodal arguments based on issues such as online identity, the digital divide, intellectual property rights, gaming, civic engagement, and online communities.

For this course, I am going to build off the work of my dissertation director and mentor, Danielle DeVoss. She has an outstanding course in Digital Rhetoric already designed, and I would like to follow her lead in terms of the general direction of the course and the overall outcomes. As I mentioned above, I feel strongly that as much of the course material as possible will be open access, so I want to use the MacArthur series as touchstone for the units in this course.

I am also thinking about doing a digital literacy autobiography in this course, utilizing digital storytelling as a means for accomplishing that goal. Bonnie Kaplan and I are already talking about that. Also, I think that it will be important for this class especially (and maybe the 460 group, too), to be thinking about design issues. I just got the third edition of Robin Williams’ Non-Designers Design Book (with color!), and I am leaning heavily towards having my students investing in that text for this course.

Clearly, I will have to do some additional thinking for both of these courses in the months to come. If you have ideas about how I can make these courses stronger, I would really appreciate hearing them.

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Last Friday, I was invited to lead a “brown bag” session for my English department’s composition program. Titled “Multiliteracies in Composition,” we focused our pre-reading on an article about a second-year college composition course developed at Michigan Tech called “Revisions.” Details can be found in the following article:

Lynch, Dennis A., and Anne Frances Wysocki. “From First-Year Composition to Second-Year Multiliteracies: Integrating Instruction in Oral, Written, and Visual Communication at a Technological University.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 26.3 (2003): 149-171.

We began by watching the Richard Miller’s presentation: The Future is Now. This presented us with a variety of challenging questions about how we might pursue such a vision of the “new humanities” at CMU, including discussions about professional development, our beliefs about the changing nature of literacy, and how, if at all, a shift in our curriculum would happen in the time frame that Lynch and Wysocki describe from their context.

We then continued in small groups with a jig saw reading, where groups posted 2-3 responses or question in their own page on my wiki. After a watching Wikis in Plain English, they understood the basics of posting and were able to see how using a wiki could allow for multiple groups to post their work and then quickly share it with the class. The conversation continued in a large group discussion, including some emerging questions:

• What do students need in terms of literacy in a changing world?
• How do multiliteracies relate to technology and communications?
• What does the multi-disciplinary approach do for departments? What about specialization?
• If everyone talks the same language, do we have our own specialties?
• What does this mean for us in terms of the course? Content? Writing?
• Faculty-only vs. Graduate Assistants–How is this possible or feasible at our University?
• What does this look like across the curriculum? Is it sustainable?
• What about assessment? Individual? Groups? Programmatic?
• Is there still a need for traditional comp courses? Don’t you still need a first year comp?
• How does the continuing focus in professional organizations on 21st century lliteracies contribute to this discussion (last week’s NCTE statement on the future of composition), both for college and life?
• What would the writing center need to/be expected to do?
• Does this perpetuate a two-tiered society, a Gutenberg in reverse?
• How do we support faculty in these collaborations?
• Is the resistance about learning to do old things with new technologies or really coming to understand a new paradigm that the new technologies allow?

We ended with Michael Wesch and his students’: A Vision of Students Today, and just in time for a sunny mid-winter drive home. All told, it was a timely and lively discussion for our department, and I appreciated having the opportunity to facilitate the session. Given the release of the 2008 Horizon Report, it seems as though we are constantly reminded that things continue to change. I hope that this session serves as a spark that continues into further conversations about multiliteracies in composition later this semester.



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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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Here is a video from Richard E. Miller, the Chair of the Department of English at Rutgers, explaining his thinking about the shift to a new vision of the humanities and how that vision will be enacted through physical space at the university. It certainly suggests some of the changes that we will have to make in our thinking, especially at the universtiy level.

One particular element of this video that makes it compelling is his idea about the missing piece of the Wikipedia puzzle, and what universities have to offer students as they make their way in a read/write web world.

Here is a post that got lost in the end-of-semester rush in my Firefox’s ScribeFire plugin.

Boy, it’s fun to find something you thought you had lost, especially on a computer.

I never really finished it, so it trails off at the end, but I think that I get the point across.

—

USA Today posted this story about Mandarin immersion, a topic close to my heart since my daughter is in one of these programs. The lead quote? From an educator in Chicago… “‘Chinese isn’t the new French–it’s the new English.’” More on the “world is flat” rhetoric in a minute, but here is a slice of the article:

As China booms, so does Mandarin in U.S. schools - USATODAY.com

The number of elementary and secondary school students studying Chinese could be as much as 10 times higher than it was seven years ago, says Marty Abbott, spokeswoman for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

When the council surveyed K-12 enrollment in foreign language classes in 2000, there were about 5,000 students of Chinese, Abbott says. The council is collecting data for another survey, but Abbott says early figures suggest the number of students now studying Chinese has “got to be somewhere around 30,000 to 50,000.”

As I’ve written before, I feel that we need to move beyond the argument that language learning — especially “critical” languages that are being taught for business and defense purposes — is simply utilitarian. There are other benefits, besides having a business edge.

For instance, I would like my daughter to understand how a country that affects our own — economically, politically, culturally, and in other ways I can’t even imagine right now — works, from the insides of the language to the way it is perceived in the world. Enjoying another language, another literacy, another rhetoric, has benefits far beyond just having a job. It offers a global perspective that will help her become a better person, a better citizen, not just someone who can cash in on a second language in a future career…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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