Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

March was like a lion for me… beginning, middle, and end. I wish there was a better excuse, but that’s the long and short of it. Conferences, prepping my portfolio for my annual review, teaching, grading, etc.

OK, enough of that.

My purpose tonight is to just capture some thinking on a presentation that Rob Rozema and I will give at the Bright Ideas Conference this weekend: Social Networking, Teacher Education, and the English Language Arts.

My main contribution to the presentation will be an annotated bibliography of sources on social networking in education. Here is what I have so far and I welcome any insights that you may have to add to this list. Feel free to comment here or jump right in and add something on the wiki:

• Resources by Educators
  • Teachers Teaching Teachers: A weekly webcast that focuses on teaching writing with newer technologies, often related to social networking
    • ELGG Plans: The wiki that these teachers use to collaboratively compose curriculum
    • Youth Voices: The site for these teachers’ high school students
    • Youth Twitter: Another site for these teachers’ students, focused on the idea of microblogging
  • Ning in Education
  • Steve Hargadon’s post about Social Networking in Education on the Infinite Thinking Machine blog
  • Social Networks in Education Wiki
  • Wesley Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog: Fryer blogs regularly about social networking in K-12 schools
    • Fryer’s del.icio.us bookmarks on social networking
• Research, Scholarship, and Policy Briefs
  • danah boyd’s publications: boyd is a scholar from the University of California-Berkeley, who researches social networking
  • Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know about Series: Clear and concise overviews of a number of technologies, including social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr
  • Pew Internet and American Life Project
  • MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Site
• News and Media
  • TechCrunch’s Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Networking
  • PBS’s Frontline: Growing Up Online

Also, I am trying to think about how to discuss the idea of social networking. What I have found with my experiences in using any social technology is that the teacher really is key to making it work. Be it a discussion board, a blog, a wiki, or a social network, if the teacher talks the talk about using technology, yet doesn’t walk the walk, then it is likely that the students won’t follow.

On a related note, I often wonder about our efforts as teachers to adapt technologies that students are using for their own personal purposes and then connecting it to more academic purposes. In what ways does this co-opting of the technology change the use of it, for better and for worse? For instance, in the social network Rob and I set up this semester, I decided not to make it a “requirement” for my ENG 315 class, and I noticed that very few students have been active in the network as an extra curricular activity. What if I had made it a requirement? Would obligatory postings be worthwhile for students? Would the network have grown more in an organic manner, even though I required it to be fertilized?

As I prepare to present this weekend, these thoughts continue to roll around in my head. In some ways, I don’t even know that I consider myself a proficient user of social networks, as I am in a number of Ning, Facebook, and other groups, yet rarely participate in any meaningful way. I am just wondering how the norms of social networking map on to the academic life of a university faculty member, let alone K-12 teachers and students. I know that they can (as the examples above show), but I am still struggling to make it work for my students.

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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

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?

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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Crazy couple of weeks here with classes starting. So, here is a post that is not really a post from me, but from the folks at the Economist. Enjoy the next round of debates!

I saw all of your earlier posts about The Economist Debate Series and wanted to thank everyone for posting about our online events. In our first two debates, thousands of participants rallied around the topics of technology in the classroom and of national competitiveness, and our third debate looks to be just as lively. This time, The Economist debates social networking and the value it adds in the classroom. I invite you and the readers to take part by registering for free and commenting.

Since you are a preferred blogger and a member of the technology and education community we aim to serve with this debate, we wanted to give you an early look at what will happen on Tuesday when we kick off the debate.

• This month’s debate proposition is: “The house believes that social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom.”

• Our expert debaters are two leaders in education and technology, and will square off for three rounds of debate.
  • CON - Michael Bugeja, Director of Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Iowa State University of Science and Technology. The author of 21 books whose research is often cited by the New York Times, Dr. Bugeja was among the first to analyze the use of social networks (Facebook & Second Life) before their use by students and educators was widespread and well-understood.
  • PRO - Ewan McIntosh, National Adviser on Learning and Technology Futures for Learning and Teaching Scotland, the education agency responsible for curriculum development, and a member of the Channel 4 Media Advisory Board. He writes about social media and learning for the Guardian and the BBC, speaks internationally and consults for organizations including the British Council, the RSA, General Teaching Council of Scotland, RM and Scottish Enterprise, advising on how social media can be harnessed for to improve learning. He blogs at http://edu.blogs.com

• Guest participants will also contribute featured comments
  • Parry Aftab, Founder & Executive Director, WiredSafety.org
  • Judith Krug, Directory, Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association (ALA)
  • Ann Flynn, Director, Education Technology, National School Board Association (NSBA)
  • Nancy Willard, Executive Director, The Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use

Follow the Debates on Facebook

The Economist has launched a Facebook group for followers of the debate. If you’re already a Facebook member, we encourage you to join our group where you’ll find syndicated content and be able to interact directly with members of The Economist community, including some of our previous guest participants.

Here’s a short debate schedule:

• Tuesday, January 15 - Opening statements & floor opens to comments from public
• Wednesday, January 16 - Guest Participant, Parry Aftab, WiredSafety.org
• Thursday, January 17 - Rebuttals
• Monday, January 21 - Guest Participant, Judith Krug, American Library Association
• Tuesday, January 22 - Guest Participant, Ann Flynn, National School Boards Association
• Wednesday, January 23 - Closing statements
• Thursday, January 24 - Guest Participant, Nancy Willard, Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use
• Friday, January 25 - Debate winner announced

Check back regularly to see the latest comments by your peers and to see if the moderator or debaters picked up your or other viewpoints from the floor. And as always, if you prefer not to be contacted again by me regarding The Economist Debate Series, please let me know. I’m more than happy to comply.

Please support discourse, and may intelligence prevail!

My colleague Rob Rozema from GVSU has invited my students and I to participate in a new Ning social network, Teach English. I am very excited about the opportunity to be involved in this project, and we will also have students from Allen Webb’s course at WMU join in, too.

As we consider what we will do with this network, I think that we have to ask ourselves a key question about its implementation and potential for use: how do we account for and respond to the contradiction in local, state, and federal policies regarding internet use (for instance, no blogging or social networking) and the call to teach these skills in our schools?

In other words, if we teach students how to use social networks, will they be able to use those skills once they are teaching?

Moreover, this raises another issue that my best friend Steve Tuckey and I were discussing a few weeks back — does taking a technology and reappropriating it for use in schools undermine the excitement and potential uses for that technology?

As an example, we talked about the idea of a “cheese sandwich blog,” one that tells basically accounts for the mundane happenings in everyday life. (If we build 20 million blogs, will the readers come?). Contrast that with the more substantive kinds of blogging that many edubloggers are calling for and teaching; that is, a more “academic” form of blogging. Steve asks, what’s wrong with the cheese sandwich?

He asks this not to be sarcastic (well, OK, maybe a little bit), but more to take a critical approach to how we use blogging. From an email conversation, he says, in part:

by trying to call for highfalutin standards of rigor in what our students blog about, we are essentially trying to colonize one of the most democratic spaces with the self-important hierarchy of academia. We try to set up the same old benchmarks for “good writing” in a new environment, all the while touting the greatness of its promise as something “new.” Seems schizophrenic to me. And don’t get me started on how real-time authoring serves to feed the dragon of continuous assessment…

In other words, if we reappropriate “blogging,” into an academic setting, is it blogging anymore? Or, is the definition of “blogging” (or, perhaps, edublogging), such that a higher level of discourse is now becoming expected above and beyond the typical diary/journal/update blogs of the past. And, with microblogs in Facebook and Twitter, are we going to have to think about how to make that academic blogging, too?

Steve was interested in seeing me raise this point with the other edubloggers that are thinking about similar ideas, perhaps in another forum beyond our blogs, too. Perhaps I will write a letter to EJ or something like that. If others have an idea about where and how we might discuss this issues — the appropriate use and reappropriation of blogging for academic purposes — let me know. It will certainly be on my mind as I prepare for next semester.

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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.

Along with the K12Online Conference, here is another unique opportunity for online participation in the month of October. It was sent to me by Jeff from Sparkpr on behalf of The Economist.  Get in there and vote, the check out the debate!

Hi Troy – Jeff here from Sparkpr for The Economist.

I saw your blog, Digital Writing Digital Teaching, and am delighted to invite you and your readers to be part of an extraordinary first for Economist.com. The Economist Debate Series officially kicks off October 15^th and voting is underway now to determine the propositions that will be debated. The first subject being debated is education and we’d love to have you participate in the debate and link to the lively conversation.

The Economist Debate Series is an ongoing community forum where propositions about topical issues will be rigorously debated in the Oxford style by compelling Speakers. The Economist is inviting you and your readers to take part by voting on propositions, sharing views and opinions, and challenging the Speakers.

Five propositions have now been short-listed to address the most far-reaching and divisive aspects of the education debate covering: the place of foreign students in higher education; the position of corporate donors; and the role of technology in today’s classrooms. The highest ranking propositions will be debated, with the first launching on Oct 15th.

Cast your vote now at: http://www.economist.com/debate/?sa_campaign=debateseries/debate1/blog/DigitalWritingDigitalTeaching

Choose the most resonant propositions to be debated from the list below:

Education - The propositions:

1. This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

2. This house proposes that governments and universities everywhere should be competing to attract and educate all suitably-qualified students regardless of nationality and residence.

3. This house believes that companies donate to education mainly to win public goodwill and there is nothing wrong with this.

4. This house believes that the “digital divide” is a secondary problem in the educational needs of developing countries.

5. This house believes that social networking technologies will bring large changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom

Join the Debate

The debate schedule is as follows:

• Sep 17th-Oct 12th - Vote for your favorite proposition and join the open forum to discuss topics
• Oct 15th - Winning proposition is revealed and the Debate begins
• Oct 18th - Rebuttals. Share your comments on issues so far and vote for your winning side
• Oct 23th - Closing arguments by the Speakers. Post any additional comments you would like to share and vote for your winner
• Oct 26th - The debate winner is announced.

To receive debate updates sign up at http://www.economist.com/debate/?sa_campaign=debateseries/debate1/blog/DigitalWritingDigitalTeaching. We will then contact you to announce the winning proposition and details of the debate as it unfolds.

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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?