Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Highlights from the keynote address at the St. Clair RESA Symposium on 21st Century Learning

August 13, 2008

Port Huron High School

Yong Zhao, MSU

• Mistakes with technology and schools
  • Solution seeking problems — we put technology in school,
    but the problems were not there or evident
  • Trusting the wrong agent — Whose machine is it? The
    teachers? The students? What purpose does it serve?
  • Student attention and time — teacher, computer, books,
    other technologies, other students
  • Technology environment — we talk about
    student-to-computer ratio, but we should be talking about the entire
    school ecosystem
  • Lack of systems thinking — The jet engine on the horse
    wagon: Seymour Papert wondered if we would even turn on the engine or
    if it would destroy the wagon?
  • Didn’t anticipate major transformation — bringing one
    car to the road, then hundreds, thousands, and millions
    • Virtual marriage — the effects of socializing
      virtually (iapartment)
    • Second Life — buying real estate, products, engaging
      in educational practices
    • Gold farming — kids playing virtual games in China in
      “gaming factories”
• What can we do?
  • In schools, we have not thought about how to realign the
    human/machine relationship
    • Personal response systems
    • New Era Interactive English, Tsinghua University Press
    • Online Chinese Language Courses
  • We always need to anticipate the long term changes, not
    just the short term effects
    • Start with problems, re-imagining education
    • Develop enabling conditions
    • Reconfigure traditional institutions
    • Virtual schools and tutoring
    • Working with “digital natives”
  • “We shape our buildings; therefore they shape us.” –
    Winston Churchill
  • From Dictatorship to democracy: personal learning
    environments
    • Personalized goals, curriculum, learning approaches,
      pace, and instruction

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.”

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An email from Leigh alerted me to this great set of resources. Check them out:

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning - Series - The MIT Press

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning examines the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect peoples sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.

Thanks to the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation, open access electronic versions of all the books in this series are available. Follow the links from each title description below to read these editions.

For more on the MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative, visit http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org.

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Since it has been a few weeks since my last blog post, I have been engaged in the first and second week of RCWP’s summer institute, the online discussion for Tech Matters 2007, and a few days offline when we took a long holiday weekend up north. So, there are many, many ideas floating in my head right now — perhaps disconnected — that I want to capture before they slip away.

First, we had a great talk today at RCWP about Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies as well as the new Michigan Educational Technology Standards. You can see some of our ideas captured in our wiki page on the book. This was done to both spur on our colleagues as they write their multiliteracies learning plan and to foreground many of the issues that we want to talk about on Thursday when the state director of technology from MDE visits our site. So, more on that soon.

Second, there are some cool things developing from a social network that Kevin started, Tech Friends. Whether you are an NWP TL or not, this seems to be a great network that is focusing their discussions on issues of teaching with technology, all the while considering critical aspects of infrastructure and classroom practice. Join in!

Third, Tech Matters is next week. Paul Allison has done a great job organizing us into a DrupalEd site and the conversations there are rich, too. I am still not quite sure what is public there and what will be soon, but that is where I will be next week and much of my writing attention will be in that site.

Fourth, I am scheduled to do our sacred writing time tomorrow morning and I want to do something with syncronous collaborative writing. I am just at a loss right now for what to have them do. I might have them begin writing a story, although that could quickly get out of hand. I might try to make it more focused and have them discuss their favorite writing spaces.

Finally, I can safely say that I am feeling overwhelmed with maintaining my online identity right now. I tried Twitter for awhile, but I couldn’t keep up with it. My Flickr feed is all but dead. This blog has been neglected for many weeks. And now I have the TM07 and Tech Friends networks that I am joining in, too. I have been woefully remiss in posting to the Tech Stories blog, and I see that they are going to present at K12 Online Conference — congrats to Bonnie and Kevin — another community that I want to get involved in, too.

At what point can/shoudl we expect our colleagues to engage in learning about and learning to write with newer technologies when even the techies are overwhelmed?

Whew. That was random. But, I wanted to share some of my thinking and see if anyone can help me think about how to collect my online self. I tried Netvibes a year ago, but fell out of that habit, too.

Any ways that you can think of to organize all these ideas, activities, spaces, people, etc?

Whoever said being multiliterate would be easy though, right?

Today was my dissertation defense, and I am happy to say that I passed with no major revisions. Hooray! There are still some minor things that I need to touch up, but that is to be expected. So, my hope is that I will have this all wrapped up and turned in to the grad school in the next two weeks.

(Sigh of relief)

Now, on to the more interesting aspects of my defense. What I found very compelling was the discussion that ensued with the audience and my committee once I got done talking. I would say that the topic of the half-hour discussion centered very closely around issues of teachers’ online personas, expectations that schools/colleagues/administrators have of those teachers to develop online personas, and the power relationships embedded in those identities.

We talked about issues of read/write web technology, access to student work vs. privacy concerns, infrastructure and access in schools, the role of technology in one’s day-to-day teaching, and a number of other issues that make it difficult, if not impossible, for some teachers to develop or maintain an online persona.This was a far-ranging discussion, with implications for K-12 teachers hoping to help students develop digital writing and think about how to distribute it, both technically and ethically, as well as teacher educators thinking about how best to inform their own teaching practices.

We also talked about the ways in which newer technologies could/should allow teachers to become more political about the infrastructure and access issues that they face in their schools. For instance, is it a good idea for a teacher to blog about how bad the technology is in her school? Who is the intended audience for a blog like this and what would its purpose be?So, there are many ideas that came from this discussion, and I thank my writing group colleague, Jim, for capturing many of them in his notes. I think that all of these issues are ones that I can pursue in future work — some of which will be happening tomorrow, when I finish up interviews for the podcasting project.

And, more importantly, I am almost done! Thanks to all my friends, family, and colleagues who attended today, both in person and in spirit. I appreciate your support.