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Notes from “Pre-Service English Teachers and Web 2.0: Teaching and Learning Literacy with Digital Applications”

Luke Rodesiler and Lauren Tripp, University of Florida

• Helping pre-service teachers re-imagine what it means to be literate
  • Tools including VoiceThread, PBWorks, and Xtranormal
  • Theoretical framework including social constructionism, interactional elements of effective literacy instruction and how texts are constructed
• Primary research questions:
  • What understandings of technology do prospective English teachers receal when they are describing their technology use in public school classrooms?
  • How do prospective English teachers understandings of technology change as they become familiar with Web 2.0 applications?
  • How do prospective English teachers understand the role of Web 2.0 applications in teaching?
• Data sources:
  • Surveys with open and closed ended questions to gain understandings of their technology use in the classroom
  • Classroom observations of student teachers in context
  • Artifacts of student work, including assignments and reflections
  • Focus group interviews at the end of the semester
• Data analysis
  • Quantitative analysis of survey data
  • Qualitative analysis of classroom observations, student work, and focus group interviews
• Findings
  • Student teachers were using technology in narrowly conceived ways
    • Accessing web content to search for and/or enhance lessons
    • Using Power Point to present information
    • “When I was in my internship, YouTube and Google was all I thought of using…”
  • Understanding how Web 2.0 technologies could foster collaboration and support teaching and learning where enhanced
    • Recognized collaborative tools
    • Their own facility with technology
    • Own discourse about teaching
    • Future organization and distribution of student work
  • Collaborative effort — how this experience could work as a method for professional learning
  • Made connections between the affordances of Web 2.0 applications and literacy practices valued in English language arts
    • Potential for student collaboration, revision of student writing, engaging students
• Conclusions
  • Many students were unaware, yet were nudged toward more nuanced views of technology, texts, and literacy practices
  • We saw a shift in perception from “web-for-consumption” to “web-for-production” (using wikis, for instance)
• Concerns
  • Lack of computer and internet access in schools
  • Expanding definitions of literacy
  • Personal use of technologies vs. professional use
• Further questions
  • How can we support pre-service teachers in recognizing the availability of the tools
  • How can we expand their notions of literacy outside of technology
  • How can we help them build their personal learning network

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Doug Hartman, from MSU’s Literacy Achievement Resource Center, spoke at MRA 2010 on “The Future of Reading and Writing at the Present Time: Preparing Students and Teachers for the 21st Century.”

Update – 3/30/10 – Embedded Slideshare Presentation

He outlined four shifts that are happening as we continue to think about new literacies and technologies:

• Shift 1: The technologies students use for reading and writing are changing
  • Student whose experience with Alice in Wonderland, and her viewing of the new version from Tim Burton
    • International Children’s Digital Library — she is able to see the original version of Alice in Wonderland as it was printed
    • Finds a 1903 silent movie version of Alice in Wonderland
  • Kaiser Family Foundation Report suggests that teens are reading more online now than they are reading offline
    • 64% of American teens are online creators
    • 35% of girls who are online are blogging, 20% of boys; about 50% read blogs
  • NYT story on a reading family
  • How students apply to college — students using digital videos to create a college application “essay” (from NPR)
  • 6000 year history of literacy in just a few minutes (note: technologies don’t just go away… some features may return over time; e.g. “scrolling” and “tablets”)
    • finger writing in the earth
    • sticks and brushes
    • hieroglyphics
    • clay tablet
    • scroll (moving from clay to scroll was a dazzling shift at that time — length and durability)
    • codex/book
    • now we are moving from the book to the screen
  • Medieval Help Desk Video
  • Linguistic texts to semiotic texts (images, audio, etc)
    • The balance is tipping towards semiotic texts
    • Semiotic texts are increasingly digital
    • Digital texts are ever more online
    • Reading and viewing across these texts
  • Questions to pose:
    • Do our curriculum, standards, and assessments include the range of technologies that our students use?
• Shift 2: The strategies that students use to read and write these texts are changing
  • Looking for information to supplement what they are able to find in textbooks and is able to find so much more
    • Reading the book, looks up words he doesn’t know, and may use a secondary source
    • Reading online requires different strategies — moving from one web page to another, back to the original, and one way leading on to another; the potential for his comprehension to be expanded is enormous
    • This second type of comprehension places a higher demand on people’s cognitive abilities than typical book reading
  • Types of knowledge for reading: declarative, procedural, and conditional; once online, also adding identity, locational, and goal knowledge. Read more on his Slideshare document. (NOTE: He said that the slides from this presentation will be posted there later today.)
  • Do our curriculum, standards, and assessments include the range of strategies  that our students use?
• Shift 3 and 4 — ran out of time in the session, but “moment to moment instruction” and “professional development” are the third and fourth shifts

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This morning, I was fortunate enough to be invited “home” to present my session, “Creating Your Digital Writing Workshop” at Red Cedar Writing Project’s WIDE PATHS II. Beyond the wonderful feeling of being “home” with about 30 colleagues from RCWP and sharing my book with them, I continue to be inspired by the amazing work that teachers do in their classrooms and schools, despite the continued barrage of criticisms that come both directly from politicians and the media as well as indirectly from the ways that our society and government structure ”educational reforms” such as Race to the Top. For more on what these “reforms” mean for organizations such as the NWP, check out Sara’s recent post on IdeaPlay.

At any rate, there were many good parts of the day, and ideas from the conversations in the opening session were captured by Dawn on the presentation page. There were a number of issues that came forward, and the conversation was rich since, as a group, we were talking as knowledgeable peers, many already engaged in digital writing practices. Most notably, we thought about a number of issues related to the actual composition of digital texts, moving beyond the logistical questions that often come up (as important as they are) and into conversations about how and why students compose digital texts. Maggie captured one idea (and I am paraphrasing) in the idea that digital media allow us to create texts that are “long enough to accomplish goal, but also short enough to keep interest.”

Then, throughout the day, there were three strands: social networking, collaborative writing, and visual studies. Overall, I feel like the day was filled with timely, relevant, and useful information, right out of the NWP tradition of “teachers teaching teachers.” We worked together, learned some new ideas, got reminded of some ideas I had forgotten (like using Diigo), and, while I couldn’t attend everything, here are some notes from the other wonderful sessions throughout the day.

Social Networking (Andrea Zellner)

• Four components of participation in social networks
  • Digital Citizenship
  • Digital Footprint
  • Personal Learning
  • Impact on Writing
• Thoughts from the discussion, after creating our own personal network maps on paper
  • What does it mean to “know” someone? Be connected to someone?
  • How and when do we connect to someone? To a group? Knowing that we have access to the network at our fingertips, when and how can we leverage it?
  • Thinking about how they are invited to join social networks (Pixie Hallow, Webkinz, Facebook, Second Life) and the commercial/consumer interests that some of these networks have? What about the critical literacy practices that students need to have to understand how they are positioned within and across these networks?
  • Do we create networks that are “echo chambers” where we only listen to others in our own network that do not allow or invite us to think about alternative or opposing ideas?
  • Are we co-opting the purposes of social networks? What are we trying to teach them so that they can be digital citizens? But, are we replicating traditional, teacher-centered practices that would be the same in Blackboard, or are we taking advantage of the aspects of social networks?
  • Resources:
    • Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Around (Download the book as a free PDF)
    • Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody
    • Visible Tweets

Troy's Social Network Map

Collaborative Writing (Aram Kabodian, Heather Lewis, and LaToya Faulk)

• Heather introduced Etherpad as a tool for collaborative response to an article, then used VoiceThread as another tool for response, too. In using the two types of tools, we were thinking about the ways that text and voice comments can contribute to our own understanding of other texts, including an online article and responding to a video.
  • This got me to thinking more about VoiceThread and how to have students use that as a tool for conferring. I think that the idea of having students comment one another’s work while still “in process” is powerful. Not sure how to embed the comment at the exact moment of the video that it would be pertinent, however. A tool like Viddler’s commenting feature would work more effectively for that, I think.
  • Lots of time for playing with the tools. Thinking about collaborating across time and space with Skype, Google Docs, VoiceThread, Diigo, and other tools. What is also interesting to me is to think more carefully about the nature of the collaboration…
    • What are the affordances and constraints of the tools?
    • What is the task that we are asking students to complete? How does that enable collaboration, or does it simply require cooperation?
    • Are you asking students to create single-authored, multi-authored, or co-authored products? How does changing the role of the writer change the technology that you are able to use?

Visual Studies (Dawn Reed with Jen Garmon and Reggie Manville)

• Dawn – Showing a number of examples of images as a way to think about critical literacy, especially with images used in media and popular culture texts, for instance:
  • The ready.gov website and parodies of it
  • Forest Gump, and the ability to visually recreate history
  • Kent State image with fence post removed
  • Asking students to define “literacy” and how they experience misinformation and critically evaluate information and images. Thinking about “photographic truth” and the implications of how images are constructed in an age of easy photo manipulation.
• Reggie – Thinking about how to fit visual literacy into the already crammed English curriculum with digital storytelling
  • Moving from statements of belief (ala “This I Believe”) to statements of change created as a digital movie. Combining elements of argumentative writing with visuals.
  • Then moving from this digital video project into understanding how to create a traditional text for the ACT. In this example of women’s body image, this includes ways that the student could use the same arguments and refutations used in the movie project and translating them into traditional essay structures (building context, argument, counterargument, rebuttal, etc).
  • Complexity of assessing these texts with a rubric that was already in place. Looking at three examples — one on body image, one on global warming, one on the “open beverage” rule. But, are there some qualitative differences in these works? I think so, and I am wondering how we can help students see that there are some standards of quality in the production of digital texts. One option would be to have a “viewing” day in the class, and then inviting them to revise based on what they saw in other videos as well as feedback on their own.

Final Reflections on the Day

We were going to have a large group discussion to report out on the day, but ran out of time. My final thoughts are that Andrea and the entire RCWP team organized a wonderfully thoughtful day of exploration into these three strands: social networking, collaborative writing, and visual studies. As we continue to think about the future of what it means to be a writer and a teacher of writing in a digital age, the conversations that began today can continue to guide our work into the future. I look forward to this team sharing their insights at the NWPM retreat this summer!

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Image from www.lansingstatejournal.com

My friend and RCWP colleague, Marcus Brown, has been working for about a year to open the Village Summit in the house next door to his Lansing home. You can read about many of the trials and tribulations that Marcus, his wife, and everyone involved in creating the Village Summit have had to endure in this article from the Lansing State Journal.

In trying to figure out a way that I could help Marcus and his cause, he suggested that I spend some time with him and help develop a website for the center that highlights its services and activities. And here is where the power of  digital writing comes into the picture…

Marcus and I began talking about this last year and began a Google Site for his organization. As it does, time slipped by, we both neglected the website for a long while, and kind of forgot about it. But, when talking with him over breakfast in December, and trying to figure out how I could help, he began discussing all the ways in which we wanted to use a website to reach out to his community — people in his neighborhood helping with the Village Summit, other community organizations, the Lansing Mayor’s Office and City Council, and beyond. I was thinking about the software that he could use to compose this site, immediately moving my mind to the suite of tools that Google offers including Sites, Picasa, Maps, and Calendar. After working together for the better part of two hours, we updated the site, adding images, maps, and a calendar, not to mention a good deal of Marcus’s writing and poetry that show his passion for education and serving his community.

And, so, in less than two hours, the Village Summit had a (revised) website.

On the one hand, we could look at this as nothing remarkable. Yep, we have Google Sites and can insert plug-ins and, wow, doesn’t that make life easier for us when we make web pages.

Yet, in digging a little deeper and thinking about the socio-cultural, technical, and political literacy practices associated with how Marcus composed a site about a community center for a variety of audiences and purposes, I find the digital writing task in which the two of us were engaged to be quite fascinating. To be sure, even a few years ago, he could have created a similar site with a variety of web-based tools or software. It would have taken awhile, and he would have likely had to use a site like Geocities that put ads on his work (or buy a domain).

But, using this suite of Google tools, and having a specific set of purposes and audiences in mind, he was able to compose a multimedia text — a website that employs text, links to videos, images, and maps — to distribute his message. Composing community. All in about two hours. In less time than it used to take us to design, produce content for, and upload a basic website using Dreamweaver and FTP.

And, it’s free.

And, it’s collaborative, so others can add content.

And, it’s a public voice for a community that, even a few years ago may not have had the time or resources to develop a web-based message.

To me, as a teacher of digital writing, this was really an epiphany. Yes, of course I knew that anyone could hop online and make a site, or a blog, or a wiki, or a twitter account. Yes, I realized that our digital writing can be collaborative and shared widely. Yet, I didn’t think very clearly, until that day when Marcus and I met, about the power of digital writing — in really just a moment — to compose entire communities, to bring something into existence in ways that would have been difficult or impossible even a few years ago. I had heard of it happening with different tools, over time. But, in just under two hours, we were able to take what Marcus had started a year ago as a dream, and what we initially tried to capture on the web last summer, and brought them both together.

For me, watching Marcus connect his many literacy practices and personal passions to create this website show the heart of what it means to be multiliterate in a digital world.

Thanks, Marcus, for reminding me of it, and for all that you do to serve your community.

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After a wonderful week in Philly and while reflecting on my experiences at the NWP Annual Meeting, “Digital Is” Conference, and NCTE Convention, I was fortunate enough to engage with a Michigan colleague who, as a part of her master’s program, is doing an inquiry project on establishing her own digital writing workshop. She had picked up my book (thanks!) and then had some questions for me, specifically related to her teaching context. With her permission, I share excerpts of our email conversation here in hopes that it may be useful for some of you attempting to establish digital writing workshops in your own classrooms and schools. The exchange begins with her first question, and I have indented my responses for clarity.

1.  Access is my biggest issue.  Currently, I share a laptop cart of 20 with the whole school (about 220 kids).  I do have 5 computers in my classroom, but I am unable to sign out the cart on most days, leaving me one day a week (to compete with the whole school) to sign out the laptops.  I am currently dreaming and searching for grants to get more computers for my own classroom, but access continues to be an issue.  Not all of my students have access to computers or internet at home, and most aren’t able to use a computer during the school day.  (The competition to use one of the classroom computers can be pretty stiff, especially since many of my students have computer usage written into their IEP…  leaving all the others without class time access.)  How does one go “fully digital” without access?  Do I make blogging their weekly writing a requirement and then have them come in during lunch or after school?  Or do I wait on that part until I know everyone has fair access?

I am in a fairly fortunate position…  my class sizes are small.  But how much do I push the envelope?

You are welcome, and thanks for taking the next steps — I applaud your enthusiasm and professionalism. I look forward to hearing about your work.

Cross-posted on the Digital Writing Workshop Ning.



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Notes from “Erasing Copyright Confusion” at NCTE 2009

Joyce Valenza, Renee Hobbs, Kristin Hokanson, and Michael RobbGrieco

Center for Social Media

• Renee Hobbs, Temple — What is the purpose of copyright?
  • Protect intellectual property
  • Ownership, profit
  • Authors’ right
• In fact, the purpose of copyright is to promote creativity, innovation, and the spread of knowledge
  • Owners have pushed for longer length of copyright
• How we Cope as Educators with Copyright
  • “See no evil” teachers — don’t examine copyright issues at all
  • “Close the door” teachers — know that there is something to copyright, yet keep it private
  • “Hyper-comply” teachers — they hold on to this idea more strongly for their students than themselves
• When I use creative materials, which concepts apply?
  • Attribution — citing your sources (an academic community’s normative conventions that they agree upon to acknowledge other’s work)
  • Plagiarism — not acknowledging source material used in your work
  • Infringement — copying another’s work in violation of the law
  • Fair Use — the legal use of copyrighted works without permission or payment
  • Licensing — Asking permission and paying a fee
• Copyright balances the rights of owners with the rights of users
  • Owners get to control how their work is controlled and distributed for a limited use of time
  • As users, however, we have some rights, too
  • All those things you knew about the “30 second rule,” the “10% rule,” the “45 day rule” are not the law
    • The charts that you see, they are not the law — they are negotiated agreements that have “the appearance of positive law”
    • The guidelines actually limit our understandings of fair use
    • You can use copyrighted material in a variety of ways — criticism, comment, news reporting, scholarship AND creative work
    • Peter Jazi — the benefits to society outweigh the private costs to the copyright holder, or else copyright law becomes a form of private censorship
• Michael RobbGrieco, Temple — Responding to the Rise of Remix Culture: Challenges and opportunities for teaching, learning, and literacy
  • Are you a part of remix culture?
    • Build on others?
    • Quote passages?
    • Do you have a website?
  • Our students are fully immersed in a remix culture
    • Remix is how our students add their own personal experience to the wider culture and make their experience known to others
    • Can remix perpetuate cultural norms that are oppressive?
    • Critical remix for democracy, dialogue, and exchange
    • Single Ladies in Mayberry
  • Develop media literacy skills
    • Balancing producer and consumer identities
    • Can create shallow engagement without critical interpretation (this is where educators come in)
    • How do we realize the potential of fair use while also facing the challenges that are present?
    • How can we be critical with our students and invite interpretation and argument?
    • Michael’s video: Copyright, What’s Copyright?

• Kristin Hokanson, Upper Merion High School
  • What does it mean to add value to other people’s work?
  • Use of Flickr images for a biology project
  • Use of Dave Matthews “Gravedigger” with Spoon River Anthology
  • Media Lab’s “Teach Them to Reason” tool
  • Ending Copyright Confusion Wiki
  • Attribution is an ethical practice, not a legal one; citing sources doesn’t let you off the hook
  • Fair use is a reasoning process that requires critical thinking; context and situation determine how fair use applies.
  • Am I creating something new (through transformative use), or am I redistributing (which is, in contrast, a violation of the law)?
• Joyce Valenza, Springfield Township High School
  • Dorothy Fair Use Video
  • Copyright Friendly Wiki
• This project is a user-rights movement
  • The Code of Best Practices for Fair Use is NCTE’s official policy on fair use
  • The guidelines that have been created since the implementation of the 1970s copyright law were brought about from negotiations by the media industry; the guidelines that were created are not set down as the law

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Danielle Nicole DeVoss asks us to think about what digital was then and is now…

Digital is…

• Networked — we compose in networked spaces
• Collaborative — people are able to connect and create through these networks (LolCats)
• Multimodal — typography, kinetic type, digital stories
• Re-Mediated — taking a media object and recreating it so it moves across media; moving across text to audio to video (StarzBunnies)
• Remixed — taking bits and pieces and parts of other media to create new messages and meaning
• Policed — digital millennium copyright act; You Tube copyright issues (Fair Use)
• (Requires) Critical thinking — because of the visuals (Harry Potter, Redbook)
• (Can be) Democratic — Iran and Twitter, YouTube Debates

Writing is Digital — this is, as Elyse put it, our moment.

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Digital Storytelling: Enhancing Language, Visual, and Media Literacies

MRA 2009 Presentation

Ledong Li, Tingfeng Luo, Wen Wu, Fan Zhang, Oakland University

• What’s Your Story?
• Stories Surround Us
• What is digital storytelling?
• Daniel Meadows: “short personal multimedia tales told
  from the heart”

• Educational Use of Digital Storytelling
• Focus on specific topic and contain a particular point of
  view
• Topics range from personal tales recounting historical
  events, exploring life in one’s own community, to the search for life
  in other corners of the universe
• They can vary in length, but in education they typically
  last between 2-10 minutes

• Procedure
• Write script
• Collect assets
• Create storyboard
• Draft, edit, and finalize
• Publish it as a movie file

• Hardware
• Computer
• External hard drive/flash drive
• Headset with microphone
• Scanner
• Digital Camera/Digital Video Camera
• Facilities with access to internet

• Software
• Movie Tools: Flash, Premiere, Photostory, Movie Maker,
  iMovie
• Imaging Tools: Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, iPhoto
• Audio: Audition, iTunes, Garageband, Audacity
• Players: Windows Media Player, iTunes, VLC, Flash

• Why digital storytelling?
• Storytelling has been important to individuals since the
  early days of civilization
• In education, storytelling remains a way to teach subtle
  points and make elusive abstractions concrete
• With the latest development of computers, multimedia
  systems, and the Internet, “images, sounds, animations, and video
  clips” can be brought together with “texts,” providing a wide range of
  story formats

• The Changing World
• Friedman, “The World is Flat”
• Globalization 1.0 (1492 – 1800) Countries/trade
• Globalization 2.0 (1800 – 2000) Companies/labor
• Globalization 3.0 (2000 – Present) Individuals/internet

• Moving from web 1.0 to web 2.0
• Mode: Reading to writing
• Primary Unit of Content: Page to post
• State: Static to dynamic
• Viewed through: Web browser to Browsers, RSS Readers,
  phones
• Architecture: Client server to web services
• Content created by: Web coders to everyone
• Domain of: Geeks to “mass amateurization”

• What does this mean for learning?
• Obvious answers
• New technologies and tools
• Different workflow processes
• Competition and expectations of end users

• Less obvious answers
• New expectations for the relationship between learners
  and instructors
• New modes of writing and communication
• New literacies

• Web 2.0 to Literacy 2.0
• Web 2.0 – business model focused on a service rather than
  product that values participation, collaboration, and distribution
• Literacy 2.0 – students are appropriating digital
  applications, networks, and services; they are developing new ways of
  reading, writing, viewing, listening, and recording — new ways that
  embody this 2.0 environment
• Literacy 2.0 necessarily involves extensive
  participation, collaboration, and distribution of expertise and
  intelligence

• Purpose of our Study
• Engaging graduate students (in-service teachers) and
  undergraduates (pre-service teachers) in how to make digital stories
• Examine the potential of digital storytelling used to
  enhance traditional and new literacies
• Bridging literacy methods, changing perspectives, how to
  inform instruction

• Roles that participants played
• Writers
• Text editors
• Visual designers
• Image editors
• Voice recording specialists
• Audio editing
• Movie producers

• Impacts on education
• Practical and learner-centered
• Meets ed tech standards
• Enhances literacies: language, visual, media
• Helps build useful skills in web 2.0/literacy 2.0:
  participation, collaboration, distribution