Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

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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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’s NCTE Inbox had an official list of blog posts about the convention, as well as Traci Gardner’s commentary about whether and how teachers should blog (for the record, she thinks that they should, although some districts do not). I find this thread of conversation an interesting complement to a few others floating around today, too.

One of the threads is a group of NWP tech liaisons talking about whether and how we should start a national social network of teachers doing great things with writing and technology. This network exists, in some ways, but it is scattered in many places, not all of them “officially” sanctioned by NWP (nor do they need to be). This conversation is important though because I think that it raises one fundamental issue — for all the blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarks, RSS feeds, Facebook groups, Ning networks, and other ways that we have to stay in touch, do we actually stay in touch?

I have been thinking a lot about this lately as I help my pre-service teachers understand the implications of blogs and wikis as well as try to organize such groups for the various professional organizations that I am in including RCWP, MCTE, MRA, and CEE. How to build and maintain a network — let alone if a “formal” network is needed at all — is at the core of what I and four other colleagues are thinking about as we prepare to propose a new interactive website for CEE. There is also interaction in the works for MRA. Yet, RCWP and MCTE have had interactive sites, more or less, for a year or two now and neither of them generate much traffic. So, even if you build the space for the network, it is not a guarantee that teachers will come.

So, what to do about social networks for teachers? I am not sure how to best answer that. We are trying a wiki and Google groups for Project WRITE, and having limited interactions and success with those spaces. Is part of the problem that the idea of social networking is still too new or different from what we are used to with F2F networking? Are we still just stuck in email mode and not ready to venture out to the web to find a network, rather waiting for it to come to our inbox? Or, is it just the fact that a certain type of chemistry, one that can’t be forced, but must be natural, must emerge?

I certainly don’t have any answers, especially not tonight. But, I feel that the questions are worth asking; even if we don’t get to answering them outright, we can begin to understand why teachers (generally) choose not to use these networks. My thoughts range from being busy to not being aware, from being happy within a school-based learning community to simply not wanting to move outside of one’s comfort zones. As networks continue to grow, I think that we need to ask these fundamental questions about why and how they work for some teachers, while not for others, and whether we should be trying to make the perfect network, or rethink what it means to be a teacher in the 21st century.

Just a quick shout out to all those who attended the ACE Workshop yesterday as a part of NCTE 2007 and have begun to build our wiki. I enjoyed leading the wiki writing session. Thanks, too, to Rob, for organizing the event.

Lots of teaching and grading still to do this week before the turkey… I wish you all a wonderful holiday weekend.

Two sets of colleagues from the NWP will be featured this week in the K12 Online Conference.

Wednesday, Paul, Susan, Lee, and Chris are doing a session on “Building Online Communities for Youth.” You can catch the conversation that I moderated for their planning on the TTT website.

Tomorrow, Kevin and Bonnie will be presenting on their “Collaborative ABC Movie Project.”

So much to view and participate in; so little time this week. But, I hope to be on the TTT webcast this Wednesday and get caught up with the other happenings soon.

Also, when I get a chance, I will begin writing about RCWP’s new professional development initiative that we just kicked off, Project WRITE.

Have I mentioned before that I love Wikispaces? If not, you are hearing it now:

Wikispaces Blog » Blog Archive » Who Are You and What Are You Doing?

Who Are You and What Are You Doing? October 2nd, 2007 by sarah

In our recent mailing, we asked to hear from you – how you ended up using Wikispaces, and what motivated you to stick around and keep using it. And hear we did. In several future blog posts, we will be highlighting some of the responses we received, showing you the diverse ways that you are using Wikispaces.

Troy Hicks, a professor at Central Michigan University, is using wikis to plan and teach his courses. He has been involved with wikis for over a year. Before joining CMU’s faculty, he and other teachers at the Red Cedar Writing Project at Michigan State University began their own project, a wiki “by writing teachers, for writing teachers.” A year later, their space is going strong. They have used it as a place to post workshop outlines, share notes from conferences, link to blogs they are following, and start book lists. It has become one of the primary spaces in which these teachers collaborate to plan workshops and events for the Red Cedar Writing Project.

Of his experience with Wikispaces, Troy says, “Wikispaces is a part of my everyday life as a teacher and teacher educator, and I thank you for the outstanding service that you have created.”

Check it out as a resource for writing or for getting ideas on how to expand your own collaboration.

Thanks to the entire Wikispaces Team for their support of free wikis for K-12 teachers and students.

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