Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

For the first time in four years, I will not be going to an NWP tech/writing style workshop, and I have to admit that I am a little bit bummed. Both Tech Matters and the Technology and Writing retreat have been good sources of inspiration and collegiality over the past few summers, and I hope to capture some of those feelings in two workshops that we are planning for RCWP here in August.

The first week, August 4th, we are engaging 40 teachers from Project WRITE in an immerse, inquiry-driven study of adolescent literacy and technology. Much like Bud’s CyberCamp, we are planning to structure this workshop for teachers to make maximum use of the time, access to computers, and collegial support. For the portion of each day that I am planning, I intend to make the first hour a work/collaboration time, with the explicit goal that teachers will produce anything from one lesson to a whole unit, somehow using read/write web technology, by the end of the week. On Thursday, they will share their work with a group of cross-grade, cross-school colleagues to get feedback.

During the other half of each afternoon, I am taking a move from Tech Matters and creating “birds of a feather” groups. Want to brush up on blogs? Go to this room with this teacher leader. Want to find out about photo sharing, which we haven’t discussed yet as a group, but you want to learn something new? Come to this room with this other teacher leader. And so on. Or, keep working on your unit. Throughout the week, I hope to offer anywhere from 3-6 different experiences for people to sample from, all leading to the presentation of their final lessons.

This will be one of the last major pushes with Project WRITE. In September, we will do one of our sessions completely online. Then, we have two full day sessions on Saturdays — one in October, one in November. I am looking forward to seeing what people pull together for our August session, and to seeing what unfolds for them in the year to come as they more fully integrate technology into their teaching of adolescent literacy.

For the second week, August, 11, we are putting on our own version of Tech Matters for the RCWP leadership team. This will involve myself as a lead facilitator, four additional RCWP teacher leaders as facilitators and presenters of their own classroom case studies, and then a number of participants from the RCWP leadership team. Again, the goal is to collaborate and offer people time and space to work, this time focusing more on the work of our writing project site. Each of the case studies will provide us with a situated look at how one teacher employs technology in his/her classroom, and that will open up conversations for the leadership team about how and why we might employ similar technologies at our site for the summer institute, professional development, continuity programs, and youth programs.

Then, in the afternoon, we will have lots of playtime, where we too can do birds of a feather groupings, allow people time to play with tools introduced in the morning, and continue conversations about the future of our site’s work with technology. In some sense, this is kind of the culminating moment of our work with NWP’s technology initiative, as we are now trying to distribute the knowledge of a few key teacher leaders at our site into the larger leadership team and day-to-day work of the site.

I just wanted to capture my initial thinking on these two workshops as we finalize the SB-CEU applications and get ready to move through the month of July in a haze of firework smoke, BBQs, and long, warm summer afternoons. It is good to be thinking ahead to these events and all the great work that teachers will be engaging in this year as a result of them.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

First, I apologize for the long, long delay between posts here. For those of you who know me personally, thank you for your support and encouragement over the past few weeks. For my other readers, thanks for your patience and keeping me in your RSS reader.

At any rate, I received an email from Eric Kunh, a staff member at the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, and he suggested that some segments from this week’s “Eye on Education: What works?” might be of interest. I haven’t watched these yet, but agree that they sound engaging:

Tuesday, June 10
In Dallas, some students are now wearing GPS type devices to help keep them in school. It’s an unusual approach that has so far yielded great results. Students click on their GPS device when they get to school and it tracks their every movement throughout the day, also giving them a 9pm curfew to be home. The device also gives the student an “out” if his buddies want him to break the rules – he can say, “I can’t, I have this device on and I will get busted.” We profile a student who has turned his life around as a result.

Wednesday, June 11
The Esperanza Academy in Lawrence, Mass. is instilling a new sense of hope and future in 82 minority girls with the mission of making them tomorrow’s leaders. It has an 11 hour school day 11 months of the year, 3 meals are eaten there, all homework done there and a variety of extracurricular activities including equestrian classes, art, music, computer classes. Further, all parents have to volunteer 2 hours a week at the school. We meet the inspirational founder and head of the school, the teachers who have given up higher-paying jobs to invest in this mission and students whose lives have been dramatically changed since joining the school.

Thursday, June 12
Washington, D.C. Principal - one year into the job and the new Chancellor of the DC schools spent her first year throwing bombs and cleaning house. She’s fired a fourth of the system’s principals and central office staff, closed 23 schools, offered buyouts or fired an estimated 1000 teachers and is bringing outside management to take over 10 high schools. Principals who were retained have had to promise immediate increases in test scores. Her basic philosophy is that all children can succeed when teachers and the principal take personal responsibility for results. She’s implementing a “teach them or find another job” ethic. Further, she is a 38 year old Korean American running a school system that’s 95 per cent African American. CBS will look at these results in a school system where two thirds of all students did not have grade level reading and math skills, 74% of 8th graders lacked even basic math skills and of the 43% of students who did graduate a DC high school, only 9% had the skills to graduate college (all stats way below national averages).

That’s about it for tonight. My hope is to get back in the blogging habit really soon, as I have an NWP tech matters retreat coming up next week, and I need to get back in the swing of things.

Again, thanks for keeping me in your RSS feeds. Take care.

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.

Info on another Economist debate:

Thanks for your previous support of The Economist Debate Series – so far thousands of readers have joined in our lively debates around global topics in technology.

Today, The Economist Debate Series presents another debate proposition that is highly relevant to educators and students. The debate proposition states: “This house believes that if the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing.”

What do you think? Does technology make life simpler, or does the connected nature of our modern lives keep us in a constant state of information overload? Are students suffering because of the presence of technology? We probably all remember simpler times before our lives were saturated with text messages, emails and Google alerts, but were those better times?

We invite you and Digital Writing Digital Teaching readers to weigh in with your personal experiences and points of view on the topic.

Click here to read the opening statements for the PRO and CON side of the debate, as well as an opening statement from our Moderator, Daniel Franklin of The Economist. An expert group of debaters and guests will square off on the issue over the course of the next two weeks.

Blogged with Flock

The next Economist Debate is coming up soon. Here are details:

Timing & Proposition:

Feb. 5 – Feb 15: “Privacy vs. Security – This house believes that security in the modern age cannot be established without some erosion of individual privacy.”

Should people sacrifice elements of our privacy for the sake of making our world a more secure place?

Expert Debaters & Moderator

Two global thought leaders in security and freedom will square off on either side of the issue.

• Pro: Neil C. Livingstone, Chairman and CEO of ExecutiveAction LLC

Livingstone is the chairman and CEO of ExecutiveAction LLC, an international business solutions and risk management company. In addition to serving on numerous homeland security advisory boards, Livingstone has written nine books and more than 200 articles on terrorism and national security and has appeared on more than 1,300 television programmes as a commentator on intelligence and national-security issues.

• Con: Bob Barr, Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union

A former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia (1995-2003), Barr now occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union. In addition to teaching and practicing law, Barr serves as a board member of the National Rifle Association and heads a consulting firm, Liberty Strategies LLC. Dubbed by the New York Times as “Mr. Privacy”, Barr writes and speaks widely on civil liberties. Previously, Mr. Barr served as the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, and as an official with the CIA.

· Moderator: Daniel Franklin, Executive Editor, The Economist & Editor-In-Chief, Economist.com & Editor, The World in 2008

Guest Participants

Additional leaders in this field are serving as guest participants through the course of the debate:

• Thomas M. Sanderson Deputy Director and Senior Fellow, Transnational Threats Project (CSIS)
• Scott Berinato, Executive Director, CSO Magazine
• W. Kenneth Ferree, President, The Progress & Freedom Foundation

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

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 are some notes and reactions to the “Growing Up Online” special as it goes…

• Some initial introductions, showing students as deceptive about online activity and generally showing parents as luddites
• Scenes from schools, teachers claiming that they need to be “entertainers” and that it is difficult for students to focus and can not be engaged in thoughtful discussion
  • Students who haven’t read books because they don’t have time; rule at high school that they aren’t supposed to be using Spark Notes — is this cheating?
  • Students have to submit papers to turnitin.com; searching for instances of plagiarism
  • Do we fight against this, or accept it as reality as how the outside world works — borrowing and stealing as cheating or not
  • “Fighting the good fight” — to keep up educational standards
• Social networking — the hub of online social life
  • Kids vie forgetting the most friends through MySpace or Facebook — you have to admit that you only know a few of the friends that you meet online
  • These are also the place where kids seem to hash out their conflicts, too
  • Fight recorded and put on YouTube; students reflected on the implications for college and jobs
  • Things that adults take seriously – discretion and privacy – are taken for granted
• Relationships
  • Sending pictures in provocative settings
  • “You kinda want to look hot, but not too hot”
  • Social networking as a digital representation of identiy; teens are trying on different identities — C.J. Pascoe, Berkely
• Example of Jessica Hunter
  • Was made fun of in school, led to insercurity
  • Online, she was reborn as “Autumn Edows” and her parents didn’t know
  • Dad – she just disappeared and we would never see here
  • I was fourteen, but looked older and people started noticing – “I was on the computer all day, replying… It was crazy, but I loved it.”
  • “I didn’t feel like myself, but I liked that I didn’t feel like myself.”
  • Dad – call from principal, another parent saw a picture that was “pornographic” as far as she was concerned
  • Jessica’s parents took the computer and looked at every single file – where does the information go and how is it perceived
  • The fame and hundreds of friends were gone as quickly as it had begun – “It seems stupid that I am getting upset over it… but having it taken away is your worst nightmare.”
  • “My fear is that my good kids will make a bad decision… and will pay for it permanently.”
• Safety and social networking
  • Safe community, but social networking has punctured the safety net
  • What if a stalker gets obsessed with my children?
  • Kids think that nothing bad can happen to them
  • Media coverage of online predators; To Catch a Predator
  • Congressional hearings on predators
  • Son – my mom has always been catious, yet she is overbearing and is having a hard time getting past that
  • One family computer is stationed in the computer
  • Who gets the passwords – should the mom have access to them? Daughter – “It’s my own stuff”
  • “My parents forget that I have been online since second grade.”
  • Only one major study of predators online by Department of Justice that showed most kids know to avoid predatory practices online.
  • Kids engage in a lot more risky behavior offline. Most solicitations were very slight – Danah Boyd
  • Need to begin thinking about what students can do to each other
• Sara – eating disorders
  • I have a happy-go-lucky life, and then the real life online; thinspiration
  • I will go online and be the anorexic person that I am – some days I am completely ana, other days I am not
  • My parents know nothing is that I like to eat healthy and exercise
• Sharing on the internet
  • Putting myself out there
  • Power to act on impulse and that is where trouble happens
  • Example of students posting video from concert – some parents were appreciative, and others were mad
  • Students were mad, too, because they were getting in trouble
  • Mom – it is really hard to be on the other side, even though I remember keeping secrets
  • What is next – where else will they hang out that we can’t find them, control them?
• Cyberbullying
  • Boy who committed suicide after being bullied
  • Others who didn’t realize what was happening, including parents who thought bullying was at school
  • When a popular girl flirted with him on IM, she humiliated him at school
  • the computer amplified the pain that he was feeling in the real world
  • The internet has become a new weapon in the adolescent arsenal
  • We need to teach them good cybercitizenship
• Fundamental change in the way of life today — Danah Boyd
  • Jessica back online as Autumn Edows
    • Dad — looking for a way to create and reach out
    • My parents do support me
  • Sarah — told parents about eating disorder

Join the conversation online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/talk/

The program provided a thoughtful analysis of adolescents and their online lives, including some of the positive possibilities that kids can engage in as they compose alternative identities. Of course, the dangers were explored, yet they were contextualized in a smart way and in contrast to what we see in traditional news media (for instance, who are the predators and how are kids approached). One thing that I was disappointed about (in the general trends of teens online, not the program itself) was how many of the teens presented are really only using the internet for social networking and feeding their narrow interests, whereas only one teen was shown seriously reconsidering her identity and the positive implications that brought. Where are the kids who are — in thoughtful and productive ways — creating their own content and distributing it to a worldwide audience? What are we doing to push them to use the potential of the internet beyond simply being on Facebook? All in all, a very useful report, one that I might use to show students in my classes.

My friend Jim sent this along to me and I thought that it might be of interest to many of you, especially those of you who are parents. I am going to try to watch it and would be interested in hearing your thoughts and reactions to it.

FRONTLINE: coming soon: growing up online | PBS

FRONTLINE INVESTIGATES THE RISKS, REALITIES AND MISCONCEPTIONS OF TEEN LIFE ON THE INTERNET

FRONTLINE presents
GROWING UP ONLINE

Tuesday, January 22, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS

www.pbs.org/frontline/kidsonline

Jessica Hunter was a shy and awkward girl who struggled to make friends at school. Then, at age 14, she reinvented herself online as “Autumn Edows,” an alternative goth artist and model who posted provocative photos of herself on the Web, and fast developed a cult following. “I just became this whole different person,” Jessica tells FRONTLINE. “I didn’t feel like myself, but I liked the fact that I didn’t feel like myself. I felt like someone completely different. I felt like I was famous.”

News of Jessica’s growing fame as Autumn Edows reached her parents only by accident. “I got a phone call, and the principal says one of the parents had seen disturbing photographs and material of Jessica,” her father tells FRONTLINE. “They were considered to be pornographic. … I had no idea what she was doing on the Internet. That was a big surprise.”

In Growing Up Online, airing Tuesday, January 22, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about just how radically the Internet is transforming the experience of childhood. “It’s just this huge shift in which the Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it’s something that really is the province of teenagers, “ says C.J. Pascoe, a Ph.D. scholar with the University of California, Berkeley’s Digital Youth Project. “They’re able to have a private space, even while they’re still at home. They’re able to communicate with their friends and have an entire social life outside of the purview of their parents without actually having to leave the house.”

Powered by ScribeFire.

This promises to be an interesting new twist on the scholarship of teaching. I’ll be watching:

TCRecord: Article
Children and Puppets and Rats, Oh My TCR Welcomes After Ed TV

by Gary Natriello ? January 18, 2008

A new short-form web video channel joins the TCR home page

For 2008 the Teachers College Record is beginning a bit of an experiment by welcoming to its home page After Ed TV, a new web video channel produced at the EdLab at Teachers College. The mission of After Ed is to bring new thinking in the education sector to a wide audience through engaging short-form video. The channel syndicates its content using a video player that can be deployed on any webpage just like it appears on the TCR home page. Complete details on After Ed, including instructions for adding it to any webpage, are available at the main website at http://aftered.tv. There you will find the complete directory of current and past After Ed shows along with a blog in which producers of individual shows discuss the production process. The After Ed player at TCR will present a new video lineup every Friday.

After Ed takes it name from the notion that the rapid pace of change in the post-industrial era has the potential to move the education sector into a decidedly different stage than that which dominated the 20th century. The contours of this new or “after” stage are not entirely clear, but After Ed takes seriously its goal of highlighting the stresses and strains on existing educational systems as well as the growing number of clues about the future of learning.