Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Thinking Creatively: Teachers as Designers of Technology, Pedagogy, and Content (TPACK)
Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler, Michigan State University

• Three points to the refrain
  • Teaching with technology is a wicked problem
  • Wicked problems need creative solutions
  • Teachers want to create solutions
• Teaching
  • It is messy: Teaching is always “about something” — the content
  • Yet every discipline is messy, too — the canon, phonics vs whole language
  • PCK from Shulman — content and teaching need to be transformed together
  • Learning to Think by Janet Donald
  • But, where is technology? — Too much for teachers to keep up with rapid change
  • Instead, we argue for developing a thoughtful and playful attitude towards dealing with the new media ecology
  • Take, for instance, the iPhone
    • Lots of software, highly unstable, opaque
  • Yet, information technology changes everything
    • Technology and content — the move from orality to writing (Plato “writing will implant forgetfulness)
    • Victor Hugo — the book will destroy the cathedral because people don’t have to go to a place to get knowledge
    • Technology changes practice and societies
  • Pedagogy and technology
    • Combine Google with open courseware and one laptop per child, and we are looking at a fundamental shift in learning and human culture
    • We teach using Moodle, but we worry about the “I agree” phenomenon where students do not put in their own ideas
    • Moodle prevents you from seeing other postings before you post your own
    • Teaching two sections of the same course — one in Moodle, one in Facebook — studying how this changes the social and educational discourse
  • Context: pedagogy, technology, and content work in a context
    • One laptop per child compared to a computer lab children visit once a week
    • Firewalls
  • To sum up — it is complicated with different contexts and no stopping rule
    • Solutions are not right or wrong, but good or bad that are unique and context dependent (and generate new problems)
    • Teaching with technology is wicked and typical solutions don’t work
• Creative solutions
  • How do we survive in a context of change?
  • Trindadian guppy — flexible reproductive strategy with fewer babies in good times, lots of babies in bad times
  • In a world characterized by change, the best idea is to have lots of creative ideas for the new media ecology
    • What is creative?
      • I know it when I see it; easy to recognize, hard to define
      • Fantastic social innovation with educational payoff in the future — microcredit loans
      • Getting my son interested in reading by doing the March Madness brackets — he reads the newspaper every morning
  • What is creative
    • It is novel and unique in a useful way
    • It is effective
    • It is whole — complete and elegant
  • When you think about wicked problems, you need to have a “new” (novel, effective, and whole) idea
    • What does creativity have to do with it? A variation on a theme
      • Rubik’s Cube examples; tweaked to “Double Maze” by Scott Kim
    • We live in a new media ecology where standard approaches do not work
  • What are teachers and teacher educators to do?
• Teachers are designers of the total PACKage
  • We have technology, pedagogy, and content with overlaps
  • It is at the center of these three that we have technological pedagogical content knowledge
  • TPACK (also stands for “total package”)
    • What does it do?
      • Opens new possibilities (such as Moodle and the “I agree” problem)
      • Is it NEW (novel, effective, and whole)
    • 3rd graders understanding maps
      • Mapquest, KidPix, Satellite, Virtual Trips
    • A possibility — sand creatures (the walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds)
    • The walls between technology and content only exist in our mind, if we are willing to play
  • Typically, pedagogy, content, and technology are separate (or, at least, technology is separate)
    • Like learning to play jazz one note as a time
    • Need an integrated, interdisciplinary, creative approach
    • Glenn Gould ‘- Implicit in electronic culture is the idea that multiple layers are a part of the creative process
  • Play a game where you mashup different ideas of content, pedagogy, and technology
• Outro
  • Where do educators live? In a box, or in the middle of technology, content, and knowledge

Reflections
Punya and Matt continue to push me to think about how I think and talk about technology. Next week, when I return to teach ENG 315, we are talking about multiliteracies in the classroom, and I think that I will use TPACK to frame the discussion. Thinking about pedagogy (the writing workshop model), content (the expectations for K-8 writers), and technology (based on the Michigan content standards for technology). I need to come up with some ideas for scenarios, I think, to really prompt my students’ thinking about technology use. For now, I will keep mulling this over as I prepare yo deliver my presentation on Project WRITE.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: The Use of Digital Photography to Enhance Literacy Development in Young Children
Lauren Cummins, Regina Rees, and Kelly Bacroft, Youngstown State University

• What do we know about literacy development?
  • Young children are natural storytellers, and they “write” stories through pictures
  • Children use pictures to help them remember about their story and be able to tell their story in more vivid language
  • Students write more when they are motivated
• What do we know about digital imagery?
  • Images provide a motivating “hook” for students to get into writing
  • Photography lets children speak with pictures
  • Visual “think alouds” can helps students support the writing process
  • Learn content
• Will the use of digital imagery to write a story increase a child’s amount of words produced and effective use of story elements?
  • Five day workshop, 1.5 hours per day
  • Urban elementary school
  • Thirteen third graders
• Workshop outline
  • Day 1: Elements of an effective story
  • Day 2: Learning to use the cameras
  • Day 3: Choose images and storyboard
  • Day 4: Creating final story
  • Day 5: Story celebration
• Results
  • Pre-writing sample from same prompt as compared to post showed increase in many students’ scores
    • For instance, 42 words in original story up to 107 in sample story shared here
    • Lowest increase was at least 67% and an average of 233%
  • Reflections:
    • Children tended to focus on telling about the pictures and needed more experience in storytelling with the pictures
    • Storyboards helped with the story elements
    • Most of the children took pictures of their families and this changed the story prompt for some
• Implications
  • Children can improve their literacy skills through the use of digital imagery
  • This is especially true for urban children
  • Writing prompts need to be related to children’s read world experiences
  • Students are interested and motivated

Social Networking in PreK-6: What Are Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Other Online Communities All About?
Nancy Yost, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

• Social networks
  • Profiles
  • Network
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Personal Journals
  • Connecting with families and friends
• 8.2 million 3-17 year olds were expected to visit virtual worlds in a month (eMarketer research group)
  • Where are young children going?
  • Why should we be interested? For instance, 10 million Peguin Club members.
  • They give kids a context for using social networking and instant messaging
  • Maybe we need to look at how these sites are used and figure out what’s there and how, perhaps, they can support ISTE standards and classroom connections
• Content Analysis for Social Networking
  • Access
  • Parental Controal
  • Safety information
  • Ages for which the site is designed
  • Types of interactions allowed
  • ISTE standards addressed
  • Content standards adressed
  • User friendly?
• Webkinz
  • Purchase a stuffed animal and get access code (then you get a one-year subscription to the website) and get to look at all the merchandise you can get virtually and for your stuffed figure
  • Parental controls to keep informed, page on safety information
  • Club house that has structured chat and they tried to have an open chat, but they closed it
  • Academic/content games in the Webkinz world
• ISTE Standards
  • 1: Creativity and Innovation
  • 4: Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving, and Decision Making
  • 5: Digital Citizenship
• What’s next
  • Overview of all sites, with recommendations for educational uses
  • What opportunities might we be missing by not using social networking sites in our classrooms?

Why Do Some Teachers Trust Technology and Some Don’t?
Andrea Francis, Michigan State University

• Reasons for Exclusion
  • Lack of social and institutional support
  • Lack of funding
  • Lack of adwquate training for the task
• Psychological Factors
  • Fear of using digital technologies
  • Inability to overcome “functional fixedness”
• Why do some people trust technology and others don’t?
  • Trust
    • Measuring trust: benevolence, reliable, competent, honest, openness; vulnerability and confidence of the truster
    • We have measures of trust for people, but what about artifacts? Is my cell phone benevolent? Is my computer honest?
    • The protean nature of digital technology
    • Trust and the Intentional Stance (Demmet, 1987)
      • Physical stance — the apple falls because of gravity
      • Design stance — a programmer creates something for a reason
      • Intentional stance — where a human takes on the feeling that the artifacts has intentions
    • Examples
      • Turkle (1984) — story of Robert and merlin
      • Nass and Moon (2000) — computers as social actors hypothesis; following a social script
      • Mishra (2006) — praise and blame (if you praise them for a difficult task, then they have more self-confidence). Students preferred praise irrespective of the difficulty of the task
  • Trust in computers involves one party’s willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on the confidence that a digital technology is reliable and predictable.
• Survey to capture the construct of “trust” in digital technology
  • Trust in technology in general, computers in particular, and other technologies (cell phone, GPS, etc.)
  • Reliability of particularly technologies and competence in using technologies
  • Create composite scores for trust in technology, computers, devices — look at this in relation to other variables
  • Look at predictive validity to see how teachers who use technology in classrooms may use it better when they become teachers

I Podcast, You Podcast, Together We Podcast: Podcasting as a Learning Tool in Second Language Classrooms
Kim Tohill, Blue Mountain High School, Pennsylvania, PA

• Over half of the people had heard of podcasting, forty percent had MP3 players, only 10% actually downloaded a podcast before
• Many teachers didn’t think that podcasting applied to their subject area, didn’t have enough time, were unfamiliar with the technology, or that the school didn’t have the materiasl
• Language immersion for students since they are only in the Spanish classroom for a few minutes each day
  • Why not use podcasting to get them to get immersed in the language from other news and entertainment sources in the target language?
  • Podcasting as mobile language immersion; also looking at native speakers from other countries who have posted videos to YouTube
  • Students post their podcsts online so they can listen to one another and do it, rather than in front of the class or in front of the teacher
  • • Many didn’t take the time to listen to themselves; some did attempt to do it again and again until they got it right
    • Most of them preferred this type of communication rather than speaking to their classmates in a language that is not thier own
    • Creates an “audio portfolio” that captures their voice over time; teacher can return to it as many times as needed
    • Field recordings and virtual tours; situational dialogues amongst more experienced speakers
    • Podcasting Links, including Gabcast and Podomatic

This week, I am at SITE 2008, preparing for a presentation on Project WRITE tomorrow. Today, I will try to blog from some of the sessions (as wifi will allow). Here are three sessions on digital storytelling that I attended this morning. (I will also cross-post on the Using Technology to Tell Stories Blog):

An Instructional Design Approach for Integrating Digital Storytelling into the Classroom Using iMovie
Patrick Bell, University of Nevada, Reno

• Project for Catholic Schools in San Francisco
  • Pre- and post-surveys for teacher indicated interests in storytelling
• The effective digital story:
  • Uses only a few images, a few words, and fewer special effects to powrfully communicate meaning
  • Flows naturally and is limited to 2-3 minutes
  • Is supported with effective teacher training
  • Focuses on the writing and communication proess rather than just digital effects
  • Is solidly grounded in curriculum and expresses relevant content knowledge (Question: what counts as curriculum? Is this only for expository reports of content?)
• Goals of the project
  • Implement teacher training on effective and efficient methods of integrating digital video editing technology into the classroom
  • Enable students to creat enhancements to traditional written/oral assignments using digital storytelling
• Pedagogical concerns
  • Time contra inst on tech access
  • Availability of digital media equipment
  • Copyright issues
    • Technology, Education, and Harmonization Act (Note: See NCSU Library site on the TEACH act for more info)
      • No more than 5 images by a single artist of 10% of a collection of images may be used from an internet or copyrighted source, if attributed
• Design, Development, and Implementation
  • Curriculum Overview
    • In proceedings paper
  • Teachers
    • 2 hour workshop using a whole group setting with guided practice and interactive group work
    • Printed materials with step-by-step guides
    • Learned on how to import, sequence, an editing music and images
    • Techniques on internet searchers, writing scripts, and storyboarding
    • Saving and rendering digital movies into condensed Quick Time format for presentation and evaluation
  • Student Project
    • Conducting valid research using the internet, books, and materials provided by the teachers (historical perspective on the Holocaust)
    • Writing a script and creating a storyboard of images and text
    • Went through same process of creating movies as teachers did
    • Learning how to cite sources and give proper attribution to collected images and music
    • Movies were presented in a whole group setting for peer review and teacher evaluation on content, flow, and impact of story
  • Evaluating the project
    • Images
      • Limit the amount of images that students collect to 10-15 images
      • Google search for large or extra large images only
      • Choice of images that can be scaled to correct size and aspect ration
      • Images should appear for at least 10 seconds
      • text should appear long enough to be read by audience
      • Images should appear alone long enough to convey impact and meaning
    • Narrative
      • Text narrative is often more efficient than audio narratives
      • Background noise can distract from the quality of the story
      • Use of audio equipment can take more time than can be practical
    • Effects
      • Simple fades and dissolves
      • Basic effect applications for motion
      • Use b/w or sepia tones for image color consistency
    • Music
      • Create own music
      • Get copyright free music
• Conclusion
  • Effective stories captivate attention, use minimal special effects, and translate relevant content knowledge
  • They are a part of the curriculum and supported by effective teacher training
  • Enhance traditional forms of assessments

Reflections:
As I listened to this presentation, I was struck by the stark utilitarian vision of digital storytelling. In short, this seemed to be an enhanced version of writing the report that students have always been asked to do. By searching for images and creating, essentially, captions for them, then combining them into a very short movie, there is not much of the student represented here. When I think about digital storytelling, I think of the personal narrative or, at least, a much more personal take on an expository topic. This type of digital story would be easy to assess (10-15 images, appropriate captions with facts), which is not necessarily a good thing. The writing process is messy, and this is a sanitized version of digital storytelling.

“I would like to share my final with the class!” - Digital Storytelling for Education Major Students
Amy Eguchi, Bloomfield College (NJ)

• Bloomfield College
  • Independent four-year institute of 2000 students, in NJ and near NYC
• Introduction to Education
  • Gateway course for education majors, geared towards technology and is a hybrid course
  • Classroom management, multiple intelligences, lessong planning, inclusion, etc.
  • Self-reflection and life-long learning
• Why digital storytelling?
  • Introduce new educational technology that students can use in their classroom
  • Introduce alternate way of self-expression
  • Create a wonderful addition to their ePortfolio
  • Make learning “fun”
• Final assignment
  • “Your Own Journey of Learning” — create a movie that shows your learning this semester about issues in education
• Research Questions
  • Will student choose digital storytelling as an option to express learning?
  • Whill it help them express themsleves fully?
  • Will it help them reflect on themselves more effectively?
  • Will the introdcution of DS not be helpul to our student, perhaps confusing them or making them feel less capable of themselves (not in the millennial generation, other side of the digital divide)?
• Results
  • About half of the students choose to create digital stories and wanted to share them within and outside the class

Reflections:
This use of digital storytelling, too, was very functional, but did also show how teacher education students could compose their own stories (in particular, about learning how to teach). It was a different approach than the previous session, in that it discussed how students go through their own writing process to develop their own stories rather than reporting on other ideas. I am a bit concerned about the idea that this was done to be an “addition” to a portfolio or for “fun,” but I understand how that approach appeals to pre-service teachers. All in all, this idea could be a useful twist on the digital storytelling that I am asking students to do this year.

National Writing Project Teacher Consultants Explore Digital Storytelling
Paige Baggett, University of South Alabama

• Paige is the Director of the Mobile Bay Writing Project and has been working with teachers at that site to develop digital stories
• What is the difference between a digital story and power point? Bringing out the differences in genre and the ways that we think about using storytelling.
  • Helen Barrett — “abuses” of digital storytelling, based on Center for Digital Storytelling’s definition of a personal narrative
  • Can use applications of digital storytelling — what’s in a name?
• Looking at Kevin Hodgson, DigiTales, Bernard Robin’s Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling at UHCOE

Reflections:
This was an intimate discussion with eight people, including Paige and Helen who have extensive experiences using digital storytelling. We wandered into discussions of the composing process, copyright, personal voice in narrative, uses of different digital storytelling tools, and other related ideas. Another link I forgot about: Educause’s 7 Things That You Should Know About Digital Storytelling.

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

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

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

Today, Kathy Yancey gave the keynote and the MCTE 2007 Fall Conference in Lansing, MI. Here are notes from the session.

Yancey began by asking us to think about what literacy is and a five minute discussion among the audience began the session.

• An image of tectonic plates from the public domain with the idea of continental drift.
• Themes:
  • Choice of technologies depending on rhetorical situation
  • Networked in a way that we have not been before
  • Intrapersonal Knowledge and Reflection in order to navigate this territory
• Much of what we know today began over one hundred years ago
  • When my grandmother learned to write, she learned cursive first and that was a mark of personality
  • Learning to read was important, but writing would empower people in ways that would cause problems
  • Donald Graves didn’t know that there was writing, only handwriting
  • The testing industry was focused on scales for handwriting — testing students was a part of testing teachers
  • The form trumps the content, and this has continued throughout the 20th century
• Now, we see literacy as an interaction of practices and technologies
  • We understand these practices better now because computers have shown us what is avaialable
  • There were also changes in literatur (Jane Austen — print to TV to film to DVD extended version)
  • We are able to understand Pride and Prejudice in completely different ways; hypertext allows us to find things easier
  • All the versions of Jane Austen are good, and we can understand her in many other ways, in print and on many screens

  The history of literacy continues to change, and more and more work is available in digital forms

  • With new literacies today, we think in “new circulations” (print, email, text, etc.)
  • Be aware of Ed08
• While computers have come in schools, we have been using technology to mimic old literacies practices
  • Conversation embedded within a word document, between student and teacher
  • Adaptability and assumptions are a part of how we begin to work with these literacies — we do not teach them in schools.
  • This is the difference between credentials and expertise; they have the expertise in newer literacies, and I have the credentials

  Texts and technologies work in different ways

  • Social technologies succeed when they fit in with the social lives of those who engage with the technology
  • Literacy practices continue to move online
    • Adobe now allows people to mark up what used to be solidified in a PDF file by marking it with post-it style notes and other tools
  • Characters on TV are now blogging, so in addition to watching the TV show you need to stay connected that way, too
• Partnership for 21st Century Skills
  • Core subjects with 21st century themes
  • Creativity
  • Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
  • Collaboration (how do we fit this into school in ways that really matter?)
• Knowledge Frameworks
• Ken Burns, The War
  • He went directly to those inthe war rather than relying on “experts”
  • Getting these personal experiences will become more of the norm
  • Museum of African American History Museum is starting a virtual mueseum, inspired by MySpace
• It will not be all digital, we will also be in both/and (print/digital)
  • We will need new assessment practices to discuss what is working and what is not
  • How does the description of a traditional essay assessment compare to that of a digital portfolio?
  • Prensky’s digital natives — we are going to have to learn from one another
• Production of knowledge as well as consumption of sources, too
  • Digital conversion class — allowing students to only find information from blogs that they could trust
    • By looking at blogs, students were relying on the association of older literacies to find credibility in a source, but in blogs that does not work all the same way
    • Because blogs are informal, that does not mean that “average joes and joann” are prodcuing stuff; they are authored by working professional
    • This is a challenge that we need to take up as we consider 21st century literacies
  • More and more information will be tailored to us and delivered in a personalized way; the incentive to discover things on your own is lessened
    • There are dangers and we need to bring this into the classroom in a critical and informed way
    • Pandora
      • Works to define language for music and selects other songs that are similar to what you are looking for
      • This is online and free, available to all our students and not just the ones who have an iPod
    • Mapping
    • Fundamental to literacies in the 21st century
      • You can see who is networked and figure out ways to help them get networked my creating maps
      • To the extent that we leave all of this outside our classrooms, we make our children more vulnerable than eve
      • We have got to start teaching some of this — evaluating information and people
  • How can we think about teaching and learning in networks?
    • Policy — what policy would we need to change at all levels so this work counts?
    • Professional Development — what can we provide so that the curriculum includes the technology in their learning?
    • Assessment — yesterday’s assessments will not support or reward the new types of learning
      • UConn’s New Literacies Team
    • 21st century literacies are now

Opening Thoughts - Day 2

• Dixie Goswami - Bread Loaf
• Think about a follow up conference in 2009 that would invite the young people with whom we are working to attend as well. The literacy that our young people are learning is collaborative; every talk that I have heard shows that the students are the primary source about technology tools and making meaning with one another.
• We need to figure out how we, as professionals, can invite our young people into this work so we can learn from them. Shirley Heath used to remind us that students are resources to be developed, not problems to be solved. The conversation is shifting, and we will move that shift and critique the technology tools that we use.
• The next time we convene, we will have young people who will be able to be “advocates and activists.” We need to think about students as co-researchers by reinventing the mission of teacher research so we work closely with students to find out from them and with them the meaning of what they are doing with technology.
• Years ago, we brought boxes and boxes of student work that took us the whole summer to go through. yesterday, in Renee’s sessions, she went through interviews, transcripts, videos, and other materials that made it instantly possible to see what was happening.
• Also, we don’t have to find publishers that demand certain formats for scholarly work. The only limit for sharing your work and calling it scholarly research is your own time, creativity, and ability to get it on the internet.
• There could not be a more exciting time than now. The presentations that we have watched in the past two days represent the tip of the iceberg. The school, community, colleagues, and other factors makes the ecology of technology is something that we need to look at more as well. There is a huge base of research that must be done to show how classroom practice happens, how it is formed, and what allows it to happen.
• Five, ten years ago, we would have been talking about technology tools. We don’t define the digital divide in terms of who has access to tools. Now, we are looking at which kids have the kinds of opportunities to network in school and how we are intervening in those process. The infrastructure is important, but you are asking the hard questions that culminate in the hard questions. It is not a question of whether we teach, but how we do it well.
• The big digital divide is not looked at as equipment, but opportunities for students to participate in a participatory culture. What does this mean? The challenges, risks, ethical perspectives that need to be brought to all of this mean that we can not afford to have increasing numbers of young people to be media makers only through popular culture outside of schools. Thinking about this is an incredibly complex task.
• What do classrooms look like? How do we intervene in policy?
• Karen McComas - Marshall University WP
• Starting with Renee’s first graders yesterday reminded me of what is important about what I do. I teach far more than content and I try to create an environment in which change can happen.
• Yesterday, Jackie’s list of truisms reminded me of another set of truisms that I found a few years ago from a 1998 keynote from Neil Postman. Five things:
• All technological change is a trade-off. As I bring in something new, I leave something out.
• The advantages and disadvantages of technology are never distributed evenly across the population. However, if we wait until everyone has it, we will stand still for an eternity.
• In every technology, there are two or three powerful ideas. My task, as a teacher, is to identify an utilize them.
• Technology change is additive. All things change, not just the technology
• Media tend to become mythic. We need to research it.
• Katie Wood Ray tells us that writing workshop is not easy, and not everyone can do it. I feel the same about technology and teaching with technology.
• I left my SI people with a prompt on Friday, and I wanted it to affront them. “Given the demands of the modern age, and the demands on our children’s future, is it really OK to as whether or not they can use technology in their teaching?”
• Liz Davis - DC Area WP
• I completed the institute in 1995 and was worried about technology in the classroom. In 1999, I attended a conference on the digital divide that focused on race, gender, and power. I learned a few things at this conference as I prepared to present at it.
• As I read Damico’s article, I thought more about new literacies and the way that we are moving from an ideological model to a multilitercies model. For my students, seeing the differences from home to school were not always seen as assets, but as deficits.
• Our classrooms and the ways in which we see students have been a hindrance in my ability to teach at the highest level of expectations. I teach the poorest students in Washington DC. Asking them to bring their lives into the classrooms has been something new for me.
• Yet, from bringing their lives out of the margins of my lessons has made a difference in the way I teach. When we talk about multimodal meaning making, we have to think about all the risks in doing that. Whose language has the most power? Whose literacy is valued the most, defined as standard?
• This brings into your classroom and teaching many questions that are difficult and you may not be ready to deal with.
• Damico’s article brings many questions about the technology and the ways the students learn. Yesterday, as I listened to Renee’s students, I recall the conversation that happened at my table. We automatically began thinking about why students were worried about the story’s plot, and we began looking at issues of race, class, and power. At some point, the students may have derailed the lesson, but maybe questioning what we teach is a good thing as they critically analyze what they are learning in school.
• Learning is about liberation (Friere). If students are able to take what they learn in the classroom, in the long run they should take what they have from their home, community, and streets, and then move it to a level of application that is real and applicable to them, then do we need to teach other R’s? Resistance? Revolution? Rising Up?
• I am quite excited about the direction the local and national writing project that are going. We need to take control of how we design the language of what they learn, then corporations will make it happen for us.
• Janet Swenson - Red Cedar WP
• An Old, Slightly Sea-Sick Messenger Looks at a New Media, New Literacies World
• Clifford Geertz — Tacking near, tacking far
• We need to look very closely at the phenomenon, yet then move back and look at the larger social, economic, political systems in which they are embedded.
• When the problems are very complex, we should do this often, hence the “sea sickness” of tacking in and out so quickly
• Now that we have a shared understanding of the case studies, we need to look at the common and uncommon aspects of the work.
• New tools: MP3 recorders
• New sites: social networks
• New compositions: Google Docs
• I think that now we need to tack even further away from the shore and think about the larger implications of schooling.
• Derek Bock, Our Underachieving Colleges
• As a result of participating in college, are we giving them an opportunity to acquire a meaningful vision of life, develop their character, improve their minds, address important questions about who we are and what we should become, become more critical and reflective individuals, lead full lives and complete human beings?
• How do we contextualize what we are seeing in this broad landscape?
• Some things that technology offers is a rebottling (digital scrapbooking) but Potin of MIT is worried about whether our students are only skimming the surface and not doing the deep diving that transforms lives and communities?
• Share a video: Hero in the Hallway
• Will Banks - Tar River WP
• Freewrite from a few nights ago about how what we have been thinking has challenged us. Courtney has asked us to be careful with our language.
• Paul used the term “blog” and Cessi used “electronic exchange” and there are social networks. Is what we are exploring hte confulence of things?
• Literacies are becoming relational in that things are hypertextual, and not always evident. They are much more complex and chaotic than even HTML of just a few years ago.
• This emerging set of literacies has to do with engaging chaos.
• Can these textual events be taught? What do we learn from them? Can the texts give answers to the questions we have?
• These literacy events and our occasioning these events seem to emerge rather than exist? How do you teach this?

Here are notes from Joe and Ailish’s presentation on “Language Learning and Peer Response Online in a High School ELL Classroom.” They both teach at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland.

“Language Learning and Peer Response Online in a High School ELL Classroom”
by Joe Bellino and Ailish Zompa

• Overview of Project
• What we wanted students to get from our Google Docs project
• We wanted students to have the opportunity to easily read the writing of their classmates
• We wanted students to practice using language that would help their classmates improve ideas and development
• We wanted to encourage students to improve their own ideas and development
• In 1988, Joe did a teacher research project looking at peer conferencing in his ESOL students. He found that students felt:
• The papers were hard to read
• Students didn’t trust feedback (”How can someone else learning English help me?”)
• Students were sometimes reluctant to participate
• But, it still helped their writing.
• Then, computers came along and it simplified mechanical aspects of writing and allowed them to read more. We used Nicenet to get and give feedback, but the threaded discussion would put comments way down the page.
• Look of peer conferencing with Google Docs:
• More time on task
• More reading
• More feedback
• Looking at the writing of one student
• Jealousy writing prompt based on a Brief Constructed Response model
• Students would read the prompt, write a response, and post it on their Google Doc account. After they finished their post, they had to visit five other students and comment on their writing.
• Looking at one particular student’s work.
• Tech Note: Joe and Ailish have students only create ONE Google Doc for the entire year and the student erases the first assignment when they prepare to write the second one.
• Looking closely at the ten steps in the revision process where other students commented on his work and then he made revision:
• What do you see in the student’s work?
• Questions and comments
• What questions do you have for this student?

My reflections on the presentation

As I listened to Joe and Ailish describe their work, I am amazed and the beautiful simplicity that Google Docs has allowed them in framing a writing workshop in their classroom. Gone are the days of multiple overheads, copying students’ work, finding many colored pens, disks that were lost or broken, compatibility issues with word processors/hardware, and waiting (and waiting and waiting) for feedback. Instead, as they noted above, the students are spending more time on task, really reading (and learning from) one another’s writing, and offering more feedback over time, even if it isn’t as substantive feedback as we would like to see to begin with. I feel that you are only as good a writer as the feedback that you give others, so looking at how Joe and Ailish have used Google Docs to streamline the feedback process makes me think that it is a useful pedagogical tool.

Using the conference questions to analyze the case study

• What is the distinctive power that technology brings to learning to write and literacy? How does it enhance and change the way students learn to write? how does it enhance and chance the teachers teach writing and literacy?
• Efficiency and organization of paperwork
• Student motivation, for whatever reason, there is some excitement on the part of kids as they are using tech
• It is the use of the technology, not the technology itself
• Peer response works in this kind of situation
• As teachers use technology in teaching, and students use it for learning in the classroom, new challenges and vulnerabilities have become evident. What are the concerns, pitfalls, risks, and vulnerabilities that accompany literacy, and teaching literacy in the digital age? What lessons have we learned about these challenges and problems?
• What happens when things change (from Writely to Google Docs, when the server is down, etc)?
• The sparse community of like-minded people — how are we going to spread this out and share it.
• The definition of what it means to be literate keeps evolving. Through the ages it has referred to written communication and expression using pen and paper. The audience has been those who have had access to the hard copy product. In the digital age, these as well as other aspects of literacy have changed. Now, when you think about being a writer or being literate in the digital age, what is the same and what is different?
• Multiliteracies - linguistic/rhetorical diversity from student
• Is being able to collaborate a “literacy” that we must be fluent in as well?
• Why would we try something else when we are comfortable? Some people try technology just to try it, where as we need to think about how he technology is more effective for getting students to learn what we want them to learn? There is an education part related to these new literacies that has to happen?

Teaching Writing in the 21st Century - Opening Session Notes

History of the Organizations’ Work

Bread Loaf Teachers Network - Dixie Goswami

• Founded in 1984 with the belief that working class children’s rich literacies were not part of their learning in schools.
• The vignettes that will be shared tomorrow are about connections and advocacy in the teaching of writing.
• Our children, and ourselves, must learn to engage in new technologies in order to work with others in the 21st century.
• Bread Loaf has a common experience — we have studied together at one of the four campuses. Sometimes we meet every summer for four or five summers and then again year-round. The teachers in the network constantly reinvent it.
• At one point in the late 80s, as many as half of the Bread Loaf teachers were NWP fellows.
• Coming together today is very much a part of who we are about.

National Writing Project - Elyse Eidman-Aadahl

• Our work begins with the Urban Site Network and when they began looking closely at how they could look at practice and modeled a network off of Bread Net.
• They invested in 1400 baud modems and then connected the network together. This conversation led to a book.
• We wanted to bring a culture of teaching, learning, and inquiry into the field of electronic communication. This led to other projects such as Write for Your Life.
• This led to the Design Team work, as well as the Netheads. This group helped us think of the E-Anthology, the Tech Liaison Network, interactions through our website. They are many things that we tried and abandoned, too.
• Then, there were discussions with software designers so we could think about how to build the cultural spaces for teachers and students.
• The Technology Liaisons came from this work and now each site has a TL and, in many cases, a tech team.
• Now we are at a point that we can look across the network and see how all sites are working. This connects to the work of Bread Loaf so we can pull this together to think about a conversation about literacy, teaching, learning, and professional development for writing.
• This also culminated in the work of the supplemental funding for the Technology Initiative and supported sites as they created technology professional development. This brought in Inverness Research Associates, and this meeting is really a culmination of that initiative, too.

Inveness Research Associates - Laura Stokes

• Use data to help NWP make a case for their own growth and funding as well as their impact on the field.
• For the Technology Initiative, there have been 11 sites for 3 years for “research and development” in supporting “wise uses of technology for teaching writing.”
• Inverness documented the work with the particular focus on the challenges to provide capacity in this area by interviewing, observing, and documenting the work.
• Technology and teaching writing in all NWP work
• 86% of sites use tech in SI work
• 27% in continuity
• 18% in PD
• 24% in youth programs
• What we infer from this as we stand back and look at it is that there is a pretty heavy investment in the leadership development, but it disperses as it moves out into the schools. Only about 1/5 of the time does it get to schools
• These numbers have been growing over the past three years, too.
• At the Tech Initiative sites, the small amount of money led to heavy investment in teacher leaders at the site.
• Observations on the Tech Initiative and the field at large (how does this meeting fit into the field)
• Providing high quality professional development programs in writing requires development of knowledge capacity in three dimensions
• Writing
• Teaching of writing
• Professional development in the teaching of writing
• Adding “wise use of technology” makes the capacity building in every dimensions both different and more complex
• Writing with technology
• Nature of discipline
• Composing process and tools
• Multiple modalities of literacy and expression
• Teaching writing with technology
• Availability of sound practical knowledge about best practice
• Teacher facility with relevant technology
• Teacher judgment about trade-offs
• Technological infrastructure
• Doing PD for teaching writing with technology
• Teacher learning is different
• Judgment on choosing tools
• Variability of sites ability to do the work in local schools
• The shared knowledge in this domain is sparse or at least elusive. People and networks involved in this are working in essentially uncharted territory.
• Thus, the focus of capacity development has been to generate sharable, practical knowledge about effective classroom practices.
• You are doing basic pedagogical research in teaching and learning with technology. You are doing the work to demonstrate practices that will, eventually, be deemed as “best practices.”
• Teams of K-12 and university faculty have focused on:
• Separating the technological wheat from the chaff
• Reflecting on student experience and learning
• Reflection on teacher learning and change
• Grappling with the reality of technological infrastructure in schools, seeking balance of feasibility and innovation.
• If we show teachers something innovative and they don’t have access, it won’t matter how excited they are, they won’t be able to make it work.
• Trying to push on the infrastructure in terms of opening up the internet and finding simple and free tools.
• Those doing this work believe it has been some of the most exciting and important work that they have ever done.
• Students are already interacting in a digital world
• Teachers have a responsibility to teach for this world and a growing eagerness to learn
• The development work — the generation of usable material for teaching — is intellectually satisfying
• There still seems to be a disconnect between writing with technology and solving the AYP problem in school
• Given that this development work is multi-dimensional, complex, uncharted, exciting and important, it is important to stay grounded in an inquiry stance.
• Moving toward knowledge generating talk from instances of practice
• What is the distinctive power that technology brings to learning to write and literacy? How does it enhance and change the way students learn to write? how does it enhance and chance the teachers teach writing and literacy?
• As teachers use technology in teaching, and students use it for learning in the classroom, new challenges and vulnerabilities have become evident. What are the concerns, pitfalls, risks, and vulnerabilities that accompany literacy, and teaching literacy in the digital age? What lessons have we learned about these challenges and problems?
• The definition of what it means to be literate keeps evolving. Through the ages it has referred to written communication and expression using pen and paper. The audience has been those who have had access to the hard copy product. In the digital age, these as well as other aspects of literacy have changed. Now, when you think about being a writer or being literate in the digital age, what is the same and what is different?

We’ve just been asked to reflect on a presentation about the history of the Bread Loaf Teachers Network, the NWP, and the Technology Initiative Work. It has been useful to be reminded of this history, and think about where we are at in this unique moment. In particular, there are three questions that they want us to consider today and tomorrow as we engage in the working meeting:

• What is the distinctive power that technology brings to learning to write and literacy? How does it enhance and change the way students learn to write? how does it enhance and chance the teachers teach writing and literacy?
• As teachers use technology in teaching, and students use it for learning in the classroom, new challenges and vulnerabilities have become evident. What are the concerns, pitfalls, risks, and vulnerabilities that accompany literacy, and teaching literacy in the digital age? What lessons have we learned about these challenges and problems?
• The definition of what it means to be literate keeps evolving. Through the ages it has referred to written communication and expression using pen and paper. The audience has been those who have had access to the hard copy product. In the digital age, these as well as other aspects of literacy have changed. Now, when you think about being a writer or being literate in the digital age, what is the same and what is different?

For the moment, I will focus on the first one and think about the question that I have — if we know that technology brings a distinctive power to the process of learning to write, and there is compelling (although not a ton of) evidence that it does, why are schools not opening embracing new models for teaching and learning writing? We know that schools are institutions that have power structures in place that are hard to change, but haven’t we come to a point in history where we, as a society, must make a substantial investment in both the hardware/software and also the professional development of teachers?

Questions/ideas/comments from others:

• Focus on the infrastructure problem
• When I look back at my NWP work, I have some truisms such as “All writing is rewriting.” I wonder what truisms we can write into the curriculum about writing with technology.
• What are we doing to change the assessment of writing in relation to testing?
• There is an opportunity for the teacher and the tech developer to talk about how the tools work and what innovations can occur.
• We need to talk in specific terms about “technology” and what we mean by that term in light of particular tools.