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.

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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.

Another great session this week, this time with one of the co-authors of the Writing Next report: Steve Graham.

Here is an overview from the MSU LARC site:

Steve Graham, Vanderbilt University

Evidence-Based Practice in Writing – Drawing on Experimental, Qualitative, and Single Subject Design Research for Answers

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
11:30am – 1:00pm
Room 133F Erickson Hall, Michigan State University

This presentation will examine what we know about effective writing instruction, drawing on three recent reviews of the literature. One of the reviews (Writing Next) was a meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental writing intervention research. Another review was a meta-analysis of single-subject design writing intervention research. The third review was a meta-synthesis of qualitative research conducted with outstanding literacy teachers, designed to identify common practices across studies. Advantages and disadvantages to the use of evidence-based practices in writing will also be explored.

About the Speaker:

Steve Graham is the Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education and Literacy, a chair he shares with Karen R. Harris. His research interests include learning disabilities, writing instruction and writing development, and the development of self-regulation. Graham is the editor of Exceptional Children and the former editor of Contemporary Educational Psychology. He is the co-author of the Handbook of Writing Research, Handbook of Learning Disabilities, Writing Better, and Making the Writing Process Work. In 2001, Graham was elected a fellow of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities. He is the recipient of career research awards from the Council for Exceptional Children and Special Education Research Interest Group in the American Educational Research Association.

And, here are some notes from the session:

• Opening quote: “Kids know the most interesting things” - Mark Twain
  • “It hurt, the way your tongue hurts when you accidentally staple it to the wall.”
• Writing is nowhere in terms of the educational reform movement in this country
  • The things that drive the educational reform movement are reading and math
  • Now, STEM - science, technology, engineering/economics,math
  • Why is writing out in the cold?
    • This is not always bad, as it sometimes results in school practices that are not good
    • But, we need to make the case that writing is important
      • 1. One of the reasons that people are not paying attention to writing is that there is a general perception that we do not know how to teach writing. Policy makers want evidence, and they want particular kinds of evidence.
        • We do know that there are some things that work for all students 4-12 and younger
        • People don’t think that writing is important. So, we have to look at the effects of writing on content area learning. We make the case that writing can be helpful in terms of the STEM skills
        • Reading gets more play in the literacy discussion. We need to look at the effects of writing on reading. How does writing affect reading?
          2. What are the practices going on in elementary and secondary schools
          • Limitations: survey data that could be rosy, but the data is still not good
          • ELA teachers are doing less than one extended writing assignment a month
          • You don’t wan to go into policy making without good research to make recommendations

          3. Theoretical framework — from Patricia Alexander from moving from knowledge about discourse and enhancing motivation

• What are three primary resources we can draw from?
  • Professional writers
    • Unfortunately, the advice can be simplistic and only moves confident writers to expert writers; it doesn’t help other writers
  • Effective practices from experienced teachers
    • Talk to effective teachers or observe good teachers in practice and study them
      • Problem: if I go in looking for one thing, I will likely see it (difficult to separate the wheat from the shaft”
      • Problem: Donald Graves and the example that works. Yet, there are times when this doesn’t work.
      • Problem: generalizability. Evidence is often selective.
      • With scientific studies, we collect evidence, presents findings for all participants, replicability, strength of impact — all this leads to something that should be more trustworthy than insight and experience.
• This presentation, thus, will draw on three sources: experimental, single subject, and teacher practice
  • Other criteria:
    • Four replications
    • Converging evidence (the sun, the moon and the stars align)
    • Recommendations based on higher quality studies are superior
      • Process writing has very poor research, so you need to be cautious about this
      • The more studies, the merrier
  • Effect size:
    • .8 is large
    • .5 is moderate
    • .25 is small, but significant
  • Writing Next looks at overall quality of writing
    • Strategy instruction (planning, revising, editing, and regulating the writing process; 20 studies, .82 effect size (particularly helpful for kids who find writing difficult)
      • Don’t just PEE (post, explain, and expect) students need repeated modeling
      • For instance, the STOP strategy (Suspend judgment, Take a side, Organize ideas, Plan more as you go)
    • Teaching Summarization (systematic and explicit teaching of how to summarize texts); 4 studies, ? (missed it) effect size
      • Teach the six rules of summarization
    • Peer assistance (working together to plan draft and revise); 7 studies, .75 effect size
      • Needs to be a structured in a positive way — having students add questions marks and carats in their peers’ papers
    • Setting product goals (specific goals for the written product to be completed); 5 studies, .70 effect size
      • Need to tell students what you expect without limiting them
      • Product goals and revising
    • Word Processing (using word processing); 18 studies, .55 effect size
      • Some are short studies, but some are up to a year
      • Using the technology which is widely available is important, but it is used infrequently in schools or, when it is used, it is only used for final draft/publication
    • Sentence combining (constructing more complex sentences by combining shorter kernel sentences); 5 studies, .5 effect
      • Work on this together with students, then invite them to apply it back in their own writing
    • Process Approach (extended opportunities for writing, student ownership); 21 studies, . 32 effect size
      • Inviting students to engage in planning and revising is good
      • Bad news: the effect size is scattered all over the place
      • Receiving training from NWP is about a .46 effect, and is insignificant if you did not get that training
      • You can do this in a very poor way, and not get a good effect; this is compatible with a strategy approach that makes the writing more visible
    • Pre-Writing (have students engage in activities such as brainstorming; 5 studies, .32 effect
      • STOP strategy, for instance
    • Inquiry (old research); 5 studies, .32 effect
      • No pre-test done, so these studies may underestimate the effect size
        • Example: set a goal, analyze the data, look at specific strategies, and apply what you learned
          • A student in elementary school looking at conflict on the playground
    • Study of Models
      • Examines examples of specific writers and types of text; 6 studies, .25 effect
        • Model from good readings
    • Writing as a Tool for Learning (writing in the content areas); small but positive effect
      • 26 studies, but I think that it is more effective in science and math than ELA and social studies based on the effect sizes that we see
    • Grammar (explicit teaching of grammar); 11 studies, -.32 effect size
      • Quality of writing is not affected by grammar instruction
      • What this traditionally looks like is that you give a definition, example, and then is used in decontextualized works
      • If we expect it, but do not help students use grammar then it will likely not work
        • Take the kernel sentence: Dog bit mailman

      Recommendations for Struggling Writers (teaching handwriting, spelling, and typing to struggling writers — teaching transcription skills towards automaticity), small positive effect

• Single Subject Design Recommendations
  • Explicitly teach students strategies to construct paragraph; strong positive impact
    • Showing parts of a paragraph to the point that students understand the goals of writing a paragraph
  • Explicitly teaching students how to capitalize, punctuate, etc. helped
  • Reinforce positive aspects of students writing — social praise, tangible reinforcement or both as a means to increasing specific writing behaviors (small positive effect)
    • Traditional means of grading papers doesn’t work — “we get more with honey than we do with vinegar”
    • Couldn’t draw the summary effect from this, however
    • Need to move the feedback beyond the specific paper and help the student move forward in his/her writing
  • Self-monitoring (students asked to count how many errors they made); might be effective for some struggling writers
• Individual Teachers
  • Study exceptional teachers and schools
    • Practice had to be applied by the majority of schools or teachers
    • 10 Practices that might make a differences (had to occur in four or more studies)
    • Dedicate time to writing and writing instruction, with writing occuring across the curriculum
      • Get kids in the game of writing
      • Increasing writing by itself is not enough, it also needs to be motivating and give kids tools to be effective
    • Involve students in various forms of writing over time
    • Treat writing as a process
    • Keep students engaged by involving them in thoughtful acticvities such as planning compositions
    • Vary individual, small, and large group instruction
    • Mode, explain, and provide guided assistance when teaching
      • Teachers need to relinquish control
    • Provide just enough supprt so that students can make progress or carry out writing tasks and processes, but encourage students to act in a self-regulated manner as much as possible
    • Be enthusiastic about writing and create a positive environment where students are constantly encouraged to try hard, believe that the skills and strategies that they are learning will help them write well
    • Set high expectations
    • Adapt writing assignments to meet the needs of students
• Caveats
  • We should not order these practices hierarchically in terms of one being more effective thananother
    • Instead we should order them in a way that we see them working well for us
  • The database is thin
  • Just because a practice has been studied, it does not mean that it will be effective for all teachers in all classrooms.
    • Pay attention and see if it works in your classroom, with your students
  • Little data on those students who are most at-risk: ELL, learning disabilities, struggling writers
  • Lack of data on maintenance and generalization
  • Don’t really know best how best to put all of these things together
    • Think about trying to integrate some of these ideas as part of an overall approach rather than try to fit it into an existing approach
  • Teachers’ views on acceptability of these practices will clearly influence their use — this will include the issue of domain specificity
    • If you don’t accept it as a reasonable practice for you in your classroom it will not work
  • Just because a practices is effective in a study or was used by an exceptional teacher does not mean that it will always work
• Questions
  • 6 traits
    • Most studies were pre- and post-tests with no control
    • Look at journal article on Writing Next
    • 6 plus 1 looked pretty good for what was there
  • In-Service
    • When we asked ELA, science, and social studies teachers about how well their program taught them to teach writing, 70% said it was inadequate
    • We also asked about in-service preparation — you personally, school, conferences — ELA said that 70% were adequate, but 30% were inadequate
    • Most science and other content teachers didn’t feel prepared to do so
    • Not doing it at pre-service level because most states do not require a course in teaching writing
  • We have been doing this work for nearly 25 years and we have not delivered our work in terms of learning strategies approach and outreach
    • We have a distribution problem — we are not providing what we know in pre-service and in-service ed
  • A lot of this is very complicated, so we did the best practice book to give something for teachers to look at
    • We need to have support materials showing teachers how to do this — if you can see it, you can do it

My Reflections

In thinking about Dr. Graham’s talk, there are a number of salient points that I want to consider. First, he went over the 11 strategies from Writing Next and, even though there is evidence to show that all these strategies are effective, it is the individual teacher that makes the difference in writing instruction.

Second, he talked about how students can use word processing to write and revise, and that is very effective for their growth as writers; however, most of the opportunities that students have to write with the computer only involve typing in a “final draft” of something else that has been written out beforehand.

Next, he talked about peer editing and how students must be scaffolded into the process of giving feedback; just having them give comments to one another is not enough as they must use the language of writing in that talk.

Finally, he talked about the writing process approach and having an authentic purpose and audience for students should happen more often than what it is. Typically, the audience is only within the classroom walls, and students don’t share beyond their friends. Yet, he described a project in his children’s school in which students shared their work more widely and that it could be a goal for many, although not all of our assignments.

Tom Hanson from Open Education recently emailed me and alerted me to a post about technology infrastructure and professional development in schools.

How Do We Ensure Our Schools Are Staffed with Technologically Savvy Teachers — Open Education

Unfortunately, in many schools and for many teachers, the above five suggestions simply are not happening on a regular basis. But the reason that most teachers are not up-to-date on technology is that they are simply too overwhelmed by the day-to-day responsibilities of their existing schedule to be able to stay up with the technological advances that are occurring…

Therein lies the basis of the problem for teachers. While students in other countries spend more time at school than American children do, most teachers in other countries do not have additional instructional responsibilities during that extra time. Instead, time is built into the school day for teachers to collaborate, to prepare lesson materials, and to receive professional development.

This reminds me of discussions that I have been having for awhile now; to take a phrase from Tyack and Cuban,
we need to reconsider the “grammar of schooling” in a digital age. This
is not a completely new argument, yet it merits renewed attention in
this election year and as OLPC machines roll out across the world. If
we are now considering how the grammar of writing is changing in
digital spaces, so too shouldn’t we consider what happens in schools?

Tom shares some insights into what teachers could do in the rest of this post. Also, he has a great deal of other postings dealing with copyright, open source software, open course ware and other related topics. He’s in my Google Reader now, and I encourage you to subscribe as well.

These are the final three sessions that I will attend at SITE before heading home. I have notes on the keynote and follow-up conversation from this morning that I still need to clean-up and process (as well as a podcast for my presentation from a few days ago). I will get that all done later, as I need to catch a plane. So long, Las Vegas!
Technology Use Among Pre-Service Teachers: Implications for Instructions
Stephen Jenkins, Elizabeth Downs, and Terry Diamanduros, Georgia Southern University

• Not much information know about pre-service teachers and use of technology
  • Lots of info on teen use from Pew Internet
• Research Question
  • What is technology use for undergraduate pre-service teachers? for daily use, technology vs. F2F, and for communication
• Tech Ownership
  • Computer: 96%
  • Cell phone: 99%
  • Landline: 28%
  • iPod/MP3: 60%
• Daily Use
  • Cell phone talking: about 2 hours
  • Texting: about an hour
  • Academics: about an hour
  • Facebook: about an hour
  • Internet searching: about an hour
  • iPod: 45 minutes
  • Email: 45 minutes
• Face-to-Face
  • Family: One hour
  • Friends: Fours hours
  • Classmates: About two hours
  • Work: About two hours
• Audiences:
  • Generally prefer phone
• Purposes:
  • Phone primarily used for quick and serious conversations
  • Private conversations happen F2F
• Discussion
  • Course development
    • Even though they are familiar with many technologies, they may not be ready to integrate them into assignments

Evaluating the Implementation of the ISTE NETS and Performance Indicators in Teacher Education
Andrew Hunt and Jennifer Hune, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

• Research Questions
  • How do faculty perceptions of their intended curriculum compare with student perceptions of their received curriculum on integration of technology into restructured courses?
• Findings
  • We discovered that students were doing most of the things we were expecting them to do, but may not have realized that they were doing it
  • We as instructors have a different interpretation of what it means to have a computer problem
  • With intentional focus, we are able to make sure that we cover all the technologies and that the pre-service teachers understand that we are doing so

Teachers’ Belief Change in a Pedagogical Laboratory
Yuxin Ma, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

• Motivation of the Study
  • How do we affect teachers’ beliefs about the use of technology in teaching
  • Our focus: A combination of vicarious learning experiences and hands-on technology integration field experiences
  • Beliefs will change after exposure and field experience using technology; have a defining moment
• Research Questions
  • Does the pedagogical lab experience affect their beliefs about technology use?
  • What and how does it change their beliefs?
• Pedagogical Laboratory Experience
  • 4 week experience, mostly in university classroom
  • Watch video case study, experience model lesson
  • Look at a model lesson plan to modify
  • On two consecutive Saturdays, we bring in kids and have two pre-service teachers work with two children for a total of six hours
  • Critical incident technique to focus on an “aha” moment
• Data Sources
  • Teachers’ Beliefs Regarding Technology Use Survey (TBTUS)
    • Student centered learning
    • Self-efficacy for technology integration
    • Perceived value of computers
  • Teacher perception survey
  • Reflective journals
  • Follow-up interviews
• Results
  • Does the pedagogical lab use affect teacher candidates’ beliefs regarding technology use?
    • Reinforced non-learner centered belief — why?
  • Why and how does the pedagogical lab experience affect change?
    • Insignificant findings in TBTUS
    • Beliefs did change, but not measured by TBTUS
      • Value of technology in engaging students
      • Challenges in technology integration
      • Issues involved in student-centered learning — teacher wanting to keep control
      • Classroom management
      • Understanding learners
• Conclusion
  • TBTUS may not be sensitive to the changes in our program (22 hours of experience with only six hours of teaching)
  • The belief changes are different
• Future Directions
  • Provide longer treatment
  • Develop more sensitive measures
  • Train candidates on how to address various issues in student-centered learning

Reflective Digital Media in Teacher Education
Timo Portimojarvi, University of Tampere, Finland

• Developing curriculum of teacher education
  • Cultural view of curriculum and profession
    • Historical, cultural, and political objectives
    • Teachers are social and cultural actors
    • The development of the curriculum is a practice-based research process
  • Three-level curriculum model
    • Personal level - autobiographical and individual process of developing a personal and professional identity
      • Experiential life world
        • Streams of situations, feelings, actions and ideas
        • In Te, experiences in teaching practices, studies, and personal life
      • Rich multimodal documentation
        • Record of situations, experiences, and moods collected easily and quickly without critical selection
        • Basis for reflection on action (or already reflection in action)
      • Personal mobile devices
        • cellular phones for imaging, recording, and making notes (”lifeblog”)
        • Blog-based digital portfolio
    • Group level - social processes of becoming a member of the profession
      • Conceptual and practical life world
        • Practices, requirements, and cultures of the community
      • Combining and considering information
        • Dialog with peers and proportioning individual and shared new conceptions with formal requirements and personal prior knowledge
      • Shared virtual spaces
        • Group blogs and an aggregated entity of the personal blog
        • Wiki-based collaborative document creation
    • Public level - skills and attitiudes in participating in public discourses
      • Discourse of teacher profession
        • Developing curriculum and the working culture of the school
        • Connection to larger networks of colleagues, parents, and other partners
      • Producing, reproducing, and publishing formal information
        • Outlines, plans, and statements for the future
        • Reflection for action, done for preparation of future moments in various contexts, based on re-interpretation of earlier reflections
      • Public forums of participation
        • Open forums, blogs, wikis, and other environments
        • Skills for participating and the use of tools learned in teacher education
• Reflective learning in teacher profession and education
  • Teacher as reflective practitioner
    • inquiry-based approach to his or her own work
    • critical reflection as a tool for ongoing personal and professional development (revising curriculum, improving their work environmenent, professionalizing teaching, developing policy)
  • Teacher education (reflective action in 3×3 levels)
    • Refection on, in, and for action
    • Reflection about content, process, and permises
• Enhancing documentation and reflections with digital media
  • Student journals or portfolios
    • Often used in higher education context
    • Can promote reflection in many ways through varying strategies and devices
  • Digital media supporting learning and reflection — new tools for:
    • Recognition and awareness
    • Documentation
    • Sharing
    • Discussion and dialog
    • Presenting
• Framework for reflective media in teacher education
  • Aspects of the study
    • Type of media
    • Forms of activity
    • Focus of reflection
    • Digital media skills
    • Relation with information
  • Levels of study
    • Individual
    • Group
    • Public
• Results of implementing this framework will be shared in the future

Technology-rich Teacher Education: Faculty Concerns During Involvement in a Technology-Rich Cohort of Teacher Candidates
Loretta Donovan and Tim Green, Cal State-Fullerton, USA

Can We Model Wiki Use in Technology Courses to Help Teachers Use Wikis in Their Classrooms
Swapna Kumar, Boston University

• Project Steps
  • Began by looking at wikis — invited them to find three wikis used in education
  • Looked at good and bad wiki designs using Wikispaces or PBWiki
  • Dicussion on the challenges, questions, usefulness
    • Activities that the wiki is useful for
      • Reconsidered projects that they had students do in collaboration previously
        • Brainstorming
    • Instructions for using it
    • Grading of wiki work
    • Boundaries for students
  • Individual use of wikis
    • Teachers developed an activity for an element of their curriculum
      • Teachers say that students are writing better: more explicit in detail and more careful in language
• Follow-Up Study
  • Gather data from how teachers used wikis in thier classrooms and student reactions

The Mash-Up of Web 2.0 Technologies: The Future of Podcasting and Social Networking
Brad Reamsbottom and Calvin Toth, University of Lethbridge, Canada

• Podcasting: Subscription-based audio and video available for students
• Where are students accessing podcasts?
  • News
  • Entertainment
    • Current TV
  • Education
    • iTunesU
  • Social Networks
    • Digg
• Students prefer social networks
  • We went there, and they don’t want us there
• Why did we forget about other places besides social networks
  • It takes more time to create a blog, podcast, vidcast
  • It needs to be entertaining (not just a lecture on YouTube)
  • News has to entertain and make minds inquire
  • iTunes U requires lots of setup
• Podcast Problem Solving
  • Create synamic content — students don’t want to hear more lecture
  • Make it available using the tools that they use
    • Viddler
      • Video-based website that allows dynamic commenting and blog integration
      • Acts as an informant and supporting resource
    • JumpCut
      • Online video editing tool; import video, photos, and audio and edit them into a creative and fun presentation
    • TokBox
      • Web-based video conferencing
      • Send video email and make video calls
      • Video emails can be embedded on blogs
      • Blogs can hold extra resources to support the podcast
    • YouTube
  • Let your students make it viral
    • If it is attractive to them, they will repurpose it and repost it in their blogs
• Remember the Rules
  • Keep it fun and creative
  • Don’t lecture
  • Don’t limit yourself
  • Share it, don’t force it
  • Create inquiring minds
  • Imagery and sound
  • Tag it

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

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

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

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

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

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



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This past week, I was invited to present an introductory workshop on digital storytelling to a group of teachers in Alpena. Minus some minor glitches in figuring out file management with brand new jump drives, the session went well from both my perspective and that of the attendees. Exit comments were generally positive and, since I will be working with this group again, the suggestions will be very helpful, too.

Yet, in the section of the evaluations that asked teachers to rank items such as the objectives of the workshop being met, the organization, and so forth, all the positive responses were overshadowed by one question that received unusually low marks: “The impact this inservice will have on my teaching will probably be…” Responses here were at least one point lower, on average, than every other category.

This struck me as interesting because, throughout the day, we had been having discussions about access in their schools: access to computer labs and equipment, access to certain websites (such as Flickr), and access to time for planning and implementing such a project. As I reviewed these lower scores, then, I saw them not so much as a reflection on the workshop itself as much a reflection on the school contexts to which these teachers would return the next day.

I write this here not to speculate on any particular way to solve this problem, since we know the digital divide is still evident in all of our work, even in the most well endowed schools. Yet, I found it interesting that a group of engaged professionals who found the process of digital storytelling valuable and wanted to do it with their students felt, at the end of the day, as if this wouldn’t necessarily impact their classrooms due to these issues.

Moreover, I shouldn’t sound bleak, because I know that enacting professional development in the classroom is a long term-process. I wouldn’t be doing this kind of work if I didn’t believe in sustainable change over time.

Yet, these evaluations were a concrete reminder of the very real challenges that even the most motivated teachers will face. This might explain why, at a school that has nearly unlimited technology resources, Patrick Welsh explains why teacher morale is so low. He states:

Of course, the big question isn’t whether teachers like spending their time learning one new gizmo after another, but whether a parade of new technologies will help kids learn. From what I can see, that’s not the case.

A School That’s Too High on Gizmos - washingtonpost.com

I disagree with Welsh’s final claim. What I see is that technologies can help kids learn, if teachers are able to think critically about how to use them.

Yet, even with the time for professional development, sustained inquiry, and collaboration, they walk back into their classrooms with incredible demands on their time and attention that may make digital writing and digital teaching difficult, if not impossible, for them.

Apart from the idea that we give teachers more time or get more computers, what this raises for me is the idea that we have to do to shift our professional focus from “using the tools” to “engaging in literacy practices,” and all the subsequent shifts in teaching and learning that will result.

The problem, then, is how to continue that conversation, while still addressing the day-to-day needs of teaching.

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January has been a busy month for me as I have been coordinating field placements for my ENG 315 students and we have begun exploring the use of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS in our teaching lives. When we began this work a few short weeks ago, only a handful of these pre-service teachers had heard of a wiki or a podcast, fewer still knew about RSS, some had a general idea about blogs, and none of them were thinking about how these tools would translate into the teaching of writing in their classrooms. So, we started slow, and now things are moving along quite well.

The second week, we downloaded Portable Apps, and I explained my rationale for why would use these tools — both because they are free and open source as well as the idea that they need to be able to take their data with them. We also started setting up our blogs, and discussed the Common Craft video on blogs, thinking about implications for our classrooms and personal learning. The third week, we turned our attention to understanding RSS and reading each other’s blogs. This week, we set up our Google Readers, and I am now challenging them to begin using RSS reading in their professional responses.

So far, this process is going fairly smoothly and I do not feel that I am detracting from the “content” of the course by focusing on the technologies. In fact, I feel that they are helping me get some ideas across even better. For instance, it is one thing to encourage them to read each other’s blogs; it is quite another to provide them with a combined feed of everyone in their class and invite them to read, through their Google Reader, everyone’s posts. I will be building in some time for people to read and comment each week, as their reading of other blog posts will help them activate their brains for our class discussions.

Also, I am finding that they are all having “aha” moments as we move forward. Some are seeing connections to other classes an projects, and I think that they are all starting to see the ways in which we can connect with one another. For instance, one student explained how she immediately subscribed to all her friend’s blogs and, while it wasn’t purely academic, that solidified in her mind the power of RSS to gather information. In a time where we take for granted that all of our students understand so much about the web intuitively, it is good to know that we can talk about these technologies in relation to the teaching of writing and that they can begin to see some new connections.

Next up, we will be working with Rob Rozema’s class at GVSU to post our “This I Believe” essays to a Ning social network and get comments across classes. Then, after spring break, digital stories. As we continue on in the semester, I am looking forward sharing more ideas. It is interesting to compare the snapshots of two generations of teachers that I am seeing this semester — the pre-service students and the in-service teachers in Project WRITE — and compare how they are engaging with similar technologies in different ways. I feel as if with the pre-service teachers, they can pick up on the technology quickly once it is introduced, yet the conversations about pedagogy are still emerging. for the in-service teachers, we are able to talk about pedagogy very easily, but only after very thorough discussions of how and why to use the technology.

The differences are clear and makes me even more aware of the generational gap that must be happening as new teachers enter schools. They are very excited about the technology, yet can’t talk about it in pedagogically sophisticated ways. Veteran teachers are, as they should be, very concerned about pedagogy. This dichotomy makes me wonder how we can get everyone speaking the same language and beginning to think more about the pedagogy and the technology at the same time, regardless of age or experience. Then, we need to layer in discussions of literacy for everyone, because those are not present yet.

More teaching to be done, for sure and it is a great deal of fun in additional to a continual pedagogical challenge.

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Well, it is the night before classes start, and I still have that little flutter in my tummy — I had a mentor once who told me that was a good sign, because the semester you stop getting butterflies is the semester you should quit teaching. So, I either believe him, or he jinxed me. Either way, I am a bot nervous.

So, to get some of the nerves out, I will rekindle an annual tradition. Last year, I made a list of a few things that a digital teacher might want to try in 2007 in light of Time naming “you” as the person of the year in 2006. I will repost that list here and add a few more:

Last year’s list:

• Subscribe to at least five blogs and five podcasts, and read/listen to the regularly.
• Create a wiki. It can be for you, your family, your students, your school. Whatever. Just make one and play around with it.
• Learn how to post photos, videos, slideshows, or some other artifact online and think about other creative things that you can do with it.
• Create a digital story. Even if it is only a few seconds long.
• Learn more about copyright and how you and your students can use Creative Commons to produce your own digital writing.
• Write a document collaboratively.
• Get an avatar in Second Life.
• Talk for free. Heck, talk to lots of other people for free about something interesting to you.
• Get onboard with the open source movement.
• Check out other Web 2.0 options.

And, to add this year’s list:

• Join a social network such as Classroom 2.0.
• If you haven’t yet, try out microblogging with Twitter. And build a social network there, too.
• Download an install Portable Apps on a jump drive.
• Participate in a webcast.
• Read a free e-book on digital media and learning.
• Record a screencast.
• Set up a web conference.
• Develop a personal website. Google makes it a cinch.
• Get involved with a professional organization of your choice and submit a proposal to present about how you are using technology in your classroom at their annual conference.
• Encourage another teacher to begin blogging.

That’s about all for now. I feel a bit better about preparing for tomorrow, and the rest of the year. Good luck in your tech adventures this semester.




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