Let’s begin with the critique of this panel’s main premise, that social media is transforming civic education and participatory democracy. That critique was the what discussant Joel Westheimer (University of Ottawa) offered. From his perspective, the technologies that allow us to use social media — the mobile web with apps, the ability to find, share, and remix multiple forms of media relatively easily — do not fundamentally change civic participation. In one sense, I appreciate his willingness to keep us all from drinking the kool aid, and to bring his perspective as a veteran civic educator to think about the implications, or not, of social media. That said, many if us disagreed.

Thus, the panelists shared their experiences working with youth in projects surrounding civic engagement and social media, including a fantastic presentation by Antero Garcia. There is much more to talk about from his presentation, let alone the entire panel, than I can capture here, yet one rhetorical move that he made which was truly effective was to show an image of his school, taken from a news helicopter, in a lockdown. Outside the school, police patrolled and kept students and teachers locked inside for about seven hours because a “latino male” in a white t-shirt had been spotted in the area with a gun, all the while playing out on television news. The blatant uses of power and authority to, quite literally, turn the school into a prison where the innocent were incarcerated as guilty has so many levels for critical interpretation and analysis that I could write a dissertation on it. In short, Antero made it clear that he invites his students to use social media in ways that push against the dominant narratives of race, class, and prejudice that infiltrate his students’ lives.

As I continue to think about how to frame the conversation about digital writing for my next book, there is no doubt that I will have to include social media. As I think about the ways in which most students, especially teens, experience and use social media, my strong suspicion is that they still don’t see this as an act of writing (as this WIDE report from a few years back shows), thus they don’t frame it as a rhetorical situation. For K12 students, especially those growing up with 1:1 opportunities in their homes and schools, this is a significant oversight on the part of writing teachers. And, as this panel from AERA shows, the fact of the matter is that social media pervades our lives and communities, so we better figure out how to invite students to compose with these broader audiences and purposes in mind.

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Thanks to Tracy Mercier (@vr2ltch) for capturing my unfolding thought process as I responded to The Majestic Plastic Bag — and invited others to do the same — during an #engchat conversation about digital mentor texts on April 23rd.

I think I may have coined a new phrase, at least in the pedagogical sense, mashing together the classic reading comprehension strategy of a a “think aloud” with the idea of viewing a video during a Twitter-based conversation such as #engchat.

The result: a “tweet aloud,” which had me and about a half-dozen other teachers sharing our thoughts on the video while all watching it on our own screens, semi-simultaneously. In some ways, it was a backchannel conversation during a social media interaction, which was kind of doubly-meta. All the same, it was interesting for me as a facilitator and, I hope, for participants, too. It gives me something to think about as I continue to understand online pedagogy.

So, I thank Tracy for capturing that all through her Storify reflections, as well as for Meenoo in trusting me enough to try something like that with #engchat.

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Here we are with another month having passed us by and it seems like I’m struggling with a number of issues related to digital learning, in some senses, but more broadly on issues of school reform and how we will ever be able to set the ship of education sailing in the right direction again. So, this is a random series of thoughts for a single blog post, and yet I wanted to share them before this week gets underway. I promise that I will try to tie them all together in the end.

School Reform

Over the past month, I’ve been in a variety of twitter conversations with really smart people about the issue of school reform and high school dropouts and, subsequently, on two episodes of Teachers Teaching Teachers. Couple this with conversations I’ve been having with my wife about the future of our children school district which, like many in Michigan, is facing unrealistic budget constraints, declining enrollments, and mounting obstacles to real improvement. all of these conversations are interesting, and there was one recent blog post by John Merrow that captures nearly all of the frustrations I think many educators share. In particular, I found myself tweeting back and forth with Lisa Nielsen, arguing the merits of homeschooling (or alternatives to models of “schooling”). Here’s a clip:

hickstro: @InnovativeEdu Great convo on TTT. Still, what is it schls can/could do well/better than a lone student guided only by his/her own passions?10:12pm, Feb 22 from Web

InnovativeEdu: @hickstro The idea of “lone student” is a fallacy. A student has plenty of resources at their fingertips. Many are blocked/banned by school10:13pm, Feb 22 from Web

hickstro: @innovativeedu I’m happy that my 2nd grader turns to Google for info for his animal report. But he turns to me for advice on writing it.10:16pm, Feb 22 from HootSuite

InnovativeEdu: @hickstro – Why are you only seeing choices as school or Google? Many are learning w/out school & with relevant learning.10:43pm, Feb 22 from Web

hickstro: @innovativeedu I hear you. There is more than school or Google. The best parents are going to provide rich experiences for their children.10:58pm, Feb 22 from HootSuite

InnovativeEdu: @hickstro Or…the best parents will support their children in pursuing & developing rich experiences.11:03pm, Feb 22 from Web

hickstro: @innovativeedu So, is this a school problem? Or a parenting problem?11:06pm, Feb 22 from HootSuite

InnovativeEdu: @hickstro what i am talking abt is a school problem cuz there are PS students that don’t have involved parents so they need school.11:10pm, Feb 22 from Web

hickstro: @innovativeedu I’d like to think more… what can the best elements of home schooling offer schools? What can schools offer home schooling?11:13pm, Feb 22 from HootSuite

InnovativeEdu: @hickstro Many of these questions have been answered. Government won’t fund it. How do we change that? Feb 22, 11:16pm via Web

There were others involved in this conversation including Teresa Bunner, and it came at the end of a very smart episode of TTT, so there’s little bit out of context here in this blog post. I’m not sure what else say about all of it at the moment, that this will be an interesting spring as my personal life —  and education of our five children —  seem to be on a collision course with my professional life and what I truly value about schools, education, and learning.

Digital (Peer) Learning

Speaking of school (or, in this case, not school) and learning, I will be facilitating a course in Peer 2 Peer University, also known as P2PU, beginning next week with my NWP colleagues, Christina Cantrill and Katherine Frank: Writing and Inquiry in the Digital Age.  Focusing broadly on what it means to write in the digital age, my particular interest with this course is thinking carefully about how and why we can use curation tools for teaching and learning. Sure, I am riding on the coattails of the Pinterest craze and advocating for this is one of our foci. Still, I’m trying to figure out how this can be a useful tool after a conversation earlier this semester with Andrea, Leigh, and some others educators. For what it’s worth, I’ve started a board, “Content/Creation/Curation,” and already received my first comment: “I THINK YOU PEOPLE SHOULD JUST LEAVE PINTEREST ALONE! & let people like ME JUST ENJOY IT!”

Indeed. I will try.  Join the conversation at P2PU over the next few weeks.

Online Privacy

In my next seemingly random entry for the evening, I want to mention that I will be speaking this week at one of CMU’s “Speak Up, Speak Out” forums entitled “R They Watching U? Technology, Surveillance, Censorship & Privacy Rights.” Here’s the lowdown:

Date: Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Location: Bovee UC: Auditorium

Speak Up, Speak Out: The Current Events Series presents “R They Watching U? Technology, Surveillance, Censorship & Privacy Rights.” SUSO is not a lecture series – it’s more like a town hall meeting called to discuss important events and topics in the news. Each forum is an opportunity for all participants to collaborate in thinking through the issues, identify problems, and consider solutions. For more information, visit the SUSO website. The forum facilitator is Justin Smith (SASW). Panelists include: Christopher Armelagos, graduate student; Amanda Garrison, Sociology; Troy Hicks, English; Jaime Humpert, student; Roger Rehm, CMU’s Chief Information Officer; and Ken Sanney, Finance & Law.

If there are enough of my colleagues who might be interested, I’ll certainly start the twitter back channel for this conversation as well, and could even open it up as a video feed on a Google hangout. let me know if you’re interested.

And, Finally, Food Waste

So, in the wonder of all things digital, I was enjoying Netflix this morning during my jog on the treadmill, And ran across this short documentary: Dive! Living Off America’s Waste. Tonight, we have the kids watch it with us, for two reasons. First, there’s the obvious social commentary that I want them to understand  about food waste and all the issues about consumerism, consumption, environmental quality, and related ideas. Second, I found myself fascinated by the production of the film itself as a digital writing process. Jeremy Seifert appears to have produced this film in a manner that could be replicated by middle and high school students with a basic HD camera, a simple movie editing program, some creativity, and a lot of determination. I appreciated the mix of interviews, B roll footage, archival footage (most of which appeared to be from historical, public domain archives), stop motion animation, and the creative representation of food throughout. I think that the kids appreciated it, too, and my hope is that our two Girl Scouts might take this idea up as part of their social action project. At any rate, at the end of the week where I feel professionally helpless and I’m not sure to what I am doing is making much of a difference, it was good to see Jeremy’s film and to think about the power that a few good people can have in affecting change.

So, that was a mishmash of ideas for one evening. But, that’s what blogging is for, right?

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This afternoon, second year students in MSU’s Master of Arts in Educational Technology presented a conference – in person and virtually – for their teaching colleagues: RELATe (Rouen Educational Leadership and Technology Conference, #relate11). This conference comes in the middle of the 4 week summer program, and is one of the main projects for Year 2 students. As one of the instructors for the course, and a mentor to them during the planning process, I have asked them to reflect on the process of creating this conference, so I also want to add a few thoughts to the conversation about technology, leadership, inquiry, and learning.

• Planning – I have coordinated about half a dozen conferences, numerous summer institutes, countless workshops, and more than a few online events. Given that the focus of this event was for the teachers themselves to plan the event, it was difficult to step back from the planning in many ways, yet I still offered my informed opinion and helped scaffold a discussion about the conference by having them talk about effective PD, analyze past conference schedules (and lack of materials online), think about back-channeling and  archiving, and the overall presentation/hands-on balance within the conference. For the most part, I think that they did a good job planning an effective day, although I do wonder if the kiosk/hands-on times worked in the way they thought (as a combination passing time and opportunity to work one-to-one with presenters). It seemed like most of the sessions either ran over into that kiosk time, or people left because they weren’t quite sure what to do during the kiosk time.
• Thematic, not technological, approaches to organizing sessions – rather than highlighting specific technologies in session titles and descriptions, as had been done in years past, the group took a more thematic approach to designing the sessions. I think that this worked well, as it really helped them focus on the content and pedagogy aspects of TPACK (not that technology was excluded by any means, but it certainly was not the star of the show). I hope that this thematic approach guides the MAET students as they approach PD plans in their own schools.
• Social media – there was a team for social media (as well as for other aspects of the planning) and they did a great job producing a series of viral videos, sharing the hashtag, and tweeting/back-channeling during the conference. This has helped me really think about how we can, conscientiously, work with conference planners and attendees before, during, and after conferences to enhance their experience. As one MAET teacher mentioned to me — I’ve been to conferences before, but I never realized how much work goes into planning and promoting it. This is amplified even more in an age of social media. Given that many of the professionals we target for writing project and other literacy PD are still on the fringes of heavy social media use — and it was still tough to get everyone from our very techie group involved today — I wonder how we can more effectively employ social media for groups like MRA, NWP, and NCTE.
• Web streaming – I was genuinely surprised when, a week ago, I asked if anyone in the group had been a part of a webinar before and found out that no one had. Leigh did a great job setting up the Adobe Breeze rooms, and most of the actual connections worked well during the conference. One link from the Weebly site had an extra two spaces at the end and, in turn, directed people to the wrong “room” on the MSU server. Once we figured out that the spaces needed to be deleted, we were back in business. Also, we realized quickly that presenters were not advancing slides in the Connect rooms, so the virtual visitors were not on the same slide. Also, one presenter used Prezi, and the Flash interface wouldn’t play in Breeze. Then, it was tough to monitor the in-room and Twitter backchannels both at once.
• Virtual keynotes - fortunately, we had the keynoters record their sessions before hand and just join in for a Q/A session. The first one went fine, but we lost the Breeze connection on the closing keynote. So, being sure to have a back-up plan for that is important, too.

All in all, I feel that the RELATe conference was a success, both for the participants and, more importantly, for the Year 2 students who led it. I look forward to reviewing and discussing the evaluation data with them, as well as thinking about how they can transfer what they have learned about technology, inquiry, and leadership back into their own teaching contexts.

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Random notes and ideas from day one at Computers and Writing 2011:

Opening Town Hall

• Susan Antlitz — how and why do we want interactive spaces for teaching?
• Sharon Cogdill — how do technologies control us?
• Bradley Dilger — reading and writing code, using small amounts of code to attain big results
• Patricia Freitag Ericsson — break the silence and talk about what we do in our jobs: “Recuse yourself from knowing everything about everything.”
• Dickie Selfe — encouraging us to think about the waste we create in techno rhetoric (literally, the garbage that our practices create and how toxic waste is affecting other countries and people)
• Jeremy Tirrell — great data visualization using Google Earth to talk about geographic implications of our work; helping to construct multiple narratives about work in computers and composition
• Janice Walker — are we still on the “lunatic fringe” of composition studies? Are we a field, discipline, or sub-discipline?
• Q/A:
  • Gail Hawisher — maybe we should still be called computers and writing
  • Dickie Selfe — we need to move outside of our discipline to work with others outside, too

Session A: Student Production of Digital Media

• Michael Neal, Florida State University Rory Lee, Florida State University Natalie Szymanski, Florida State University Matt Davis, Florida State University
• Presentation Website and Description of the Major
  • Thoughtful assignments and annotated examples of student work
• Notes from the conversation
  • Second year of the major and there are over 650 students
  • Support from Writing Center and Digital Studio
  • Students make choices about the technologies that they use to present different projects; can’t use the same digital platform more than once
  • What responsibility do we have to teach hardware/software in class? What should students do on their own or with other support?

Session B: Making Writing Socially Engaging: Asking Why New MediaDraws Us In

• Presenters:
  • Eric A Glicker, Rancho Santiago Community College — blogging as a recursive process that moves students beyond the classroom
  • Gian S. Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and David Schaafsma, University of Illinois at Chicago – baseball poetry for a literacy project that is not academic
  • Dennis G. Jerz, Seton Hill University — are we in a post-blogging era now that Facebook is ubiquitous; is blogging becoming the new 5-paragraph essay?
  • Daisy Pignetti, University of Wisconsin-Stout — thinking about Twitter and active reading
• Guiding questions:
  • How does social media create opportunities for writers?
  • Why is it that people find social networking pales as an engaging place to write?
  • How does social media invite peer-response and interaction?

Session C: Dynamic assessment practices for media and technology classes

• Presenters:
  • Dickie Selfe, Ohio State University — wiki as a tool for intentional adaptive communities; determining how length and content of oral “nuggets” of one-hour interviews contributed to an overall effect in multimodal composition; assessment was modified based on experiences with audiences
  • Tim Jensen, Ohio State University — experimental assessment using digital media; students developing the rubric from the bottom up; discussing the assessment criteria that they developed helped describe group effort
  • Kathryn Comer, Ohio State University  – intro to digital media with a project proposal, informal studio discussion and formal workshops, and analytic reflection; could students make an argument for the composing choices that they made in their project?
  • Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Ohio State University — accounting for production by focusing on the final product (project title, genre description/rhetorical moves, technologies used, and materials/references) with students developing assessment criteria concurrently
  • Chris Manion, Ohio State University — how can we frame multimedia composition through a heuristic “habits of thought”?
• Notes
  • Question in dynamic assessment processes: Do students actually participate in a democratic design, or do a few students dominate?
  • Do we only focus on the product? Is the writer her/himself the product? — Helping students focus on the process of assessment as a part of the instruction.
  • Improving student work not only over one term but, as instructors, improving our assignments and modeling excellent student work over time

Session D: Schools: Where the public and private collide

• Presenters: Ann D. David, University of Texas at Austin Amy E. Burke, University of Texas at Austin Audra Roach, University of Texas at Austin
• Notes
  • If teachers use smart phones themselves, and most students have access via phone, what is it that keeps us from using them in class?
  • Audience inquiry in social networks: search for patterns, examine self-representation, weigh affordances, author study
  • Writing in motion:
    • Writing in short bursts, different tempos
    • Moving between pieces of writing
    • Frequent peer response
    • “Revision forward”
    • Time and space to move

The luncheon keynote was Tim Wu, talking about his book, The Master Switch. The dinner keynote was Gail Hawisher, who gave a look back and forward on the field of computers and composition.

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So, I just finished hosting the lightening round of Tweeting that is know as #engchat (wiki link).

I sat down sat down at Panera with my bread bowl at about 6:45, thinking that I would have time to eat and follow a casual conversation. An hour later, there were so many great ideas that emerged that I barely lifted my fingers from the keyboard, let alone my spoon. That said, I just want to catch a few of these ideas, and a few bites of my cold soup, before the restaurant closes!

• Even in a world of hyper-connected English teachers, we are still asking the right questions, both about teaching and technology. About access, both to the net and the tools. About teaching, both the content and the process. About assessment, both how and why. I really appreciated the questions that people asked, especially how they forced me to keep coming back to the writing and the writer, not just talk about tools.
• No matter how little or how much access we (and our students) have, we need to continue advocating for more. Milton Chen in Education Nation talks about how 1:1 access is a digital civil right, and this conversation on #engchat tonight reminds me of that. Both the chat itself (the skills and processes that I needed to engage in a twitter-based chat with colleagues is both a mental and technical challenge, not to mention how to stay focused) as well as the topics that it raises (when, for instance, do we want students to attend to an online chat as compared to a face-to-face one?) remind me of how incredibly complex this thing called “digital writing” really is. It is both immediate and archived. It is both multilayered/multithreaded/multimodal, yet intently personal and focused. It can enrich our minds and offer us alternatives, or it can drive us to distraction. When and how do we teach digital writing so that it can be useful and productive?
• There are incredible possibilities. One thread of the conversation spun off into the possibilities of gaming and how one teacher, Carl, uses Scratch with his middle school students. Showing the potential for interactive media as a space for storytelling (even if it is not “gaming” in the sense of programming and designing a full narrative with complex options), this example shows the ways in which a student can work to think through the process of writing in a different form. At one point, someone in the #engchat asked something similar to “what isn’t writing then?” and I think that it raises a good point. Whether spoken, printed, or otherwise designed with media, I think that “writing” is intentional. It involves an act of planning, revising, and producing. This Scratch example, to me, is clearly writing.

Those are some brief, initial reflections. I am so thankful for having had the chance to lead the #engchat session tonight, as it gets my new year and new semester off to a good start, helping me rethink what it is that I hope to accomplish in my teaching, research, and writing in the coming months.

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As I whittle away some time between flights on my way to visit colleagues at the Boise State Writing Project this weekend, I finally have a few moments to capture some thoughts about my experience leading the book club conversation on the English Companion Ning during the month of September. Overall, I want to start by saying that it was a positive experience, and that I was energized by the participation and enthusiasm of the 100+ members who joined in the conversation. So, my comments below don’t reflect negatively on them… it is more of a musing about what it means to be a digital writer and digital teacher, even when technology doesn’t cooperate. With the smart, collegial nudge from Kevin, I offer some thoughts on what I had hoped to do over the course of that book club discussion, as well as what really happened.

Week One: (Mis)Adventures with a Webinar
In the first week of the discussion, we got off to a wonderful start with some pre-discussion threads that led nicely into a conversation about how we are using digital writing in our classrooms this fall. There were many thoughtful conversations that happened on the forum (which I hope to reflect on in more detail in another post), and I wanted to have an opportunity to more directly address some of the questions that were emerging. So, I signed up to host an Elluminate session through LearnCentral. I thought I had gone through the steps necessary to have a full session, not the kind that was limited to only three participants. I broadcast the URL on the ECNing and on Twitter, and anxiously awaited the opportunity to chat with people in the webinar.

What happened, unfortunately, was that I had signed up to host only a three person “room” with the free version of Elluminate and, once I had logged in, only two others were able to join me. Notes appeared on the ECNing and via Twitter, and I quickly had to change gears and launch a chat in an alternative space, a Meebo chat room. That, too, gave me difficulties as I had to login (after not using Meebo for almost two years) and finding a stable URL for the chat room to share with people. Eventually, we were able to make it in, and about 15 people were in the conversation at one point.

As with all things tech, I realized again that I needed to have a back up plan for when something didn’t work the way that I wanted. My pedagogical goals were still accomplished, but only after dropping five and punting, which was frustrating. It reminds me that I (and all teachers, for that matter) need to have a certain level of TPACK in order to make plans, and contingency plans, on the spur of the moment. Fortunately, people were able to follow me to Meebo, although I am not sure how many. They had to have a certain level of experience to know that it was a problem with Elluminate, not them, and then to navigate their way to Meebo based on my updates. That takes some initiative and skill, which is tough to coach when I, as a teacher, was not able to really talk with them. While I was hoping for one experience, I had to settle for another, yet still held tight to my purposes (talking about the issues raised in the forum through an interactive chat). From this, I am reminded that we can meet our pedagogical goals using a variety of technologies, yet both teacher and learner need to have some level of expertise with navigating online spaces and be highly motivated to participate.

Week Two: A Voice(less) Thread
The second week, I wanted to create an interactive, multimedia experience through which we could all contribute to a conversation about a piece of student work. Voice Thread seemed to be the logical choice for this. So, I created a Voice Thread about Looking at Student’s Digital Work, and posted it to the ECNing forum with some discussion points for people to respond to. I welcomed comments on the forum, as well as on the Voice Thread itself, where people could leave voice, video, or text comments right there. I sent out the email to the book discussion group, and waited for replies. Kevin replied quickly to let me know that I had to adjust the settings on the Voice Thread to make it public (a point I will come back to in a moment).

By the middle of the week, there were only a few replies, and one person emailed me to say that this was a big jump for most people — moving from a text-based discussion thread on the ECNing to a Voice Thread — and that they may not have know what to do, both in the practical and technical sense. While many people still seemed comfortable with the process of reading and replying to discussion threads on the ECNing, suggesting/encouraging alternative discussion formats without the opportunity for explicit coaching and mentoring stifled the conversation. Also, it could just be that people got busy with back-to-school work, but I seem to think based on the initial technical difficulties of not being able to post, combined with the hesitation that many people may have had about moving their conversation to a Voice Thread, I inadvertently made a pedagogical move that, instead of opening up conversation, unfortunately shut it down.

As I continue to think about how and why I would invite fellow teachers and students into a Voice Thread, I think back to our brief experience using that tool in the CRWP summer institute and to this conversation on the ECNing. I am still not exactly sure why the technical problems with Voice Thread occurred in the manner that they did, but I do know that, again, I had tried to make a technological move that didn’t work with the pedagogical goal I had in mind. This time, I failed to drop five and punt. I just turned the ball over on downs, and let the week’s discussion remain stagnant, both on the Voice Thread and the ECNing. In a classroom situation, I couldn’t have let that happen, but I was able to in this case given the context of the situation. Not a teaching move that I am proud of, and it makes me think about how I might recover from such a situation in the future, both in face-to-face and online teaching. I’m still thinking.

Week 3: A (Semi) Failed Attempt to Teach Both F2F and Online
Knowing that I would be delivering an opening session at the Eastern Michigan Writing Project‘s “Writing Beyond Expectations” conference at the end of my third week of leading the book club, I had thoughts that I would create a video stream of the session for others to join into the conversation. Having cleared it with colleagues at EMWP and knowing that I would have a wifi connection that would handle the stream, I sent out a note to the ECNing and on Twitter to join in the next morning. As luck would have it, this would be strike three.

As soon as I connected to UStream and had a signal, I sent out the tweet. I tested the broadcast in another browser and it all looked good. As the time to begin the presentation neared, however, UStream lost connection to the server. I don’t know exactly why this happened — was it a UStream error, a wifi error, or user error? It doesn’t matter because, again, the technology that I had hoped to use failed me. This time, I had no backup, although I am sure that I could have tried to get another service to connect and stream if I had wanted to. But, I had no time since the presentation was starting with the audience in front of me waiting.

Also, Sara and I had hoped to have a back channel conversation occurring on a Google Doc, but because of our set up in the room (two computers running, with one unable to connect to the wifi), and the fact that many participants couldn’t connect either, I was stymied. Luckily, I was able to jump from one computer to the other and deliver my Prezi, with the few people who were able to get on the Google Doc adding some ideas. In my evaluations, many people expressed frustration with the pace of my presentation and the fact that they couldn’t get online. I know I was moving at a speed that assumed most people were online, but I wasn’t able (or, at the very least, didn’t take the time to) confirm that this was the case. Because of this, people in the room weren’t able to engage in the ways that I had hoped they would, and there certainly was no external audience either. Again, the technology didn’t work in the way that I wanted, and while we were able to recover and still have a good presentation overall, I agree with some of the comments from participants that what I did was not immediately applicable to their classrooms because, well, it just isn’t practical to fumble so much during our limited class time.

As the presentation continued and I was asked smart, hard-hitting questions about how and why we should continue to use technology when, not only in my own presentation but also in the schools in which we work we can’t rely on the technology to do what we want or need it to do, I continued to answer with my belief that we are still able to use technology now in more flexible and robust ways than we were able just a few years ago. I still believe this, and I think that technology can allow us to write beyond expectations, as I shared in an earlier blog post. Yet, these are important questions when, for the third time in three weeks, the technology guru was stymied. I began to wonder about my own stance related to technology use and I shared my frustration on Twitter. And, as I noted before, Kevin encouraged me to write and think about this experience, and here I am.

Closing Thoughts
As much as I want to say to say that I have clearer answers about why and how we should use technology to teach writing after this experience, I simply don’t. What I do know, however, and have reaffirmed through this experience, is that online and face-to-face networks of teachers who work together have the potential to make substantive changes to their teaching practices. n particular, by working together to use technologies in new ways, we can see what works, when it works, and why it doesn’t work. I am glad that I shared these “failures” in front of my colleagues because, as I noted above, it shows that even the “tech guru” doesn’t even have all the answers. Yet, I keep asking the questions and trying things out. That’s the philosophical response.

Here is the more practical response, for those who are teaching other teachers about digital writing, as well as for those of us who want to integrate digital writing into our own classrooms. When introducing a new technology/digital writing practice into our teaching, make sure that you are building on an established practice, and make sure that you have a back up plan. For instance, I wanted people in the session to be able to contribute to a collaborative Google Doc during the presentation. Many were not able to, and I simply asked them to write down (on paper) words and phrases in my talk that sparked other ideas for them. This led to a turn-and-talk moment, and we were able to move forward from there. When Elluminate didn’t work, and we couldn’t literally talk through our ideas in that forum, we switched to a chat room which, while clunky, still worked.

I wish that I had a particular plan to share with you for how to use all different kinds of technology for all different situations (when, for instance a wiki is better than a Google Doc, or which program you “should” use for digital storytelling). Yet, what this experience leading the discussion on the ECNing, and the associated failures that I had with it, remind me of is the fact that we really can’t have a strict blueprint. This is the reason that we have to think about our teaching with technology from a broader perspective, thinking about how to build our own TPACK through our own personal exploration, play, and failure. I am thankful that I continue to have opportunities to read, write, and teach about digital writing in a variety of contexts, and to learn from my mistakes.

So, I end this post where I began it… with the energy and enthusiasm of those teaching in their own digital writing workshops. At the end of September, Joel Malley represented the NWP on Capitol Hill, and shared this video about his digital writing workshop. I appreciate what he is doing with and for his students, and for all of us, in providing this vision of what it can mean to teach digital writing and it reminds me that, at the end of the day, we are all still learning.

Writing in the Digital Age from Joel Malley on Vimeo.

Thanks, Joel, for sharing this resource, and Kevin, for prompting me to write this blog post.



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Tomorrow, I have the privilege of keynoting the Eastern Michigan Writing Project’s fall conference, “Writing Beyond Expectations.” I have been giving a great deal of thought to the event, and as both a teacher educator and writing project director, have been trying to figure out how to frame my talk in light of the conference theme. Content standards and expectations, of course, come to mind when I first consider this theme, yet I have been thinking more and more about the expectations, both tacit and explicit, that we have of ourselves as teachers of writing and, equally important, that we have of our students. So, with that in mind, I am going to think through this idea of “writing beyond expectations,” especially in light of digital writing, through these three lenses: our content, our students, and ourselves.

Writing beyond content expectations

As we consider the many pressures exerted on us from state and now national content expectations, certainly we could feel angry, frustrated, confused, or downright indignant about the fact that, without much input from educators, we have had yet another set of standards put upon us and our students. And, while political opinions on this abound, I want to think for a moment about how we can use the new core standards as a place to begin, a place from which we can write beyond the expectations. In particular, I am interested in exploring how the three genres represented in the standards– argumentative, informative, and narrative — can be enhanced by digital writing.

Argumentative expectations include clear statements of one’s claim, evidence of support, and acknowledgment of counterarguments, and digital writing tools can provide opportunities for students to present their work in this mode through a variety of media. For instance, we can invite students to create podcasts in which they perform a dialogue — perhaps scripted, perhaps not — where they present their side of an argument and engage in conversation with someone holding the opposite view. We can invite them to post public service announcement videos on YouTube or Viddler, then annotate those videos with comments about effectiveness of the rhetorical strategies the writers have used. We can also invite students to create VoiceThreads around a particular topic, or engage in conversation through a social network or blog.

For informative writing, students are expected to examine a topic and support it with relevant details, including domain specific vocabulary. We can invite them to create hypertexts — via blogs, wikis, or websites — where they divide up their information into sub-pages, thinking about about when and where to insert hyperlinks to both connect their own pages and link to others. In those pages, they can think about how additional audio, video, and images can be used to provide support for the information they are trying to present. Also, we can teach them how to research with RSS and advanced search, as well as how to cite their sources with social bookmarking and online citation tools.

Narrative expectations also provide us with opportunities to explore digital possibilities, including ones to develop dialogue, characters, setting, and the arc of a story by blending words, both spoken and written, with images, music, and sound effects. Modeling a narrative in a manner similar to stories that one might hear on This American Life would be one option to pursue if using podcasting. Also, digital storytelling provides students ways to create multimedia videos that build from the mode of memoir, where the whole story really becomes more than simply the sum of its media parts. Other narrative examples that I have seen include a choose your own adventure story that has grown organically on a wiki, or the use of tweets or status updates that tell a story.

All of this is just to say that when we invite students to write beyond content expectations — considering the different ways in which we can represent argumentative, informational, and narrative modes through different media — we will give them opportunities to express themselves in different ways, always considering the audiences and purpose for their writing. Which leads next to helping students as they learn to write beyond themselves.

(Students) Writing beyond themselves

When we ask students to write, we certainly want them to meet our academic standards, yet we also know that they are trying to learn how to be writers and, perhaps even more importantly, reply to the writing of others. In this sense, we need to expect that students will write beyond themselves. By this, I do not mean that students will necessarily try to write more lengthy, complex pieces than what they are ready for, although that can sometimes present them with welcome challenges. Instead, what I suggest here is that students write beyond themselves first by focusing on external audiences and purposes and, second, by learning how to respond to others, especially through digital means.

First, I believe that students should write for external audiences, as all teachers of a writing workshop approach have advocated for over the past few decades. That said, the internet makes these external audiences much easier to communicate with, although it is not enough simply to have students post to a blog and call it good. Cultivating a community of digital writers is a task that teachers need to take seriously, which leads to the second point. A digital writer needs to be both a writer and a responder. When trying to learn about their audience, students should take the opportunity to get to know them by reading what they have written and then engaging in response. Fan fiction communities, where veteran writers mentor newer writers are a great example of this. Moreover, it is nearly as easy to respond to a digital text through talk as it is through type. Digital writing happens, in large part, due to the fact that it occurs in a network (or across networks), and expecting that students will write — and respond — beyond themselves is of critical importance for them as they become digital writers.

Writing beyond ourselves

In this sense, we want  to build on our long-held belief that teachers should be writers, and expand our understanding of who a teacher as writer actually is. What does it mean for us, as teachers, to be writers? To be digital writers? Teachers who write make better teachers of writing and, in turn, teachers who are digital writers make better teachers of digital writing. Yet, if digital writing is scary in and of itself, then teaching digital writing is probably even more of a frightful leap for most of us. Not only because we feel that we want to be “in charge” of our classroom or that we want to look nothing less than knowledgeable in front of our students, but because understanding of what digital writing is, and what it can do, is limited both by our own experiences as writers, as well as the resources present in our schools and classrooms.

In the past few years, and even in an online conversation I have facilitated this month, I have heard nearly every reason why we shouldn’t teach digital writing — from issues related to the digital divide to the lack of time we have to cram yet another thing into our curriculum to concerns about filtering and our inability to get to websites and install programs on our computers. I hear, and understand, these concerns, yet my response now — even more so than what I would have been comfortable saying just a few short years ago — is that we need simply to move forward. Even two years ago, I would have had trouble making the claim that students could have access to a word processor outside of school and be able to save their work whether they are at school, at home, at the library, or on their mobile phone. But, now, nearly all of them can. In short, we are at a point were access is, quite nearly, ubiquitous when we use cloud computing applications, and I don’t think that we have any excuse anymore for not engaging students in digital writing.

Also, we need to ask ourselves, “What does it mean to be a writer in a digital age?” When and how do we use images, sounds, and music to support our arguments, descriptions, and stories? When do we post to a blog as compared to a wiki? Why would we want to use either, or would we want to use something else instead? In what ways can we think about our own writing practices — from emailing and texting, to writing letters and lesson plans — and how we use digital tools in a variety of ways to draft, revise, and publish our work?

As we think about our content, our students, and ourselves, we need to learn to write beyond our own expectations. We need to think about the ways that we ask our students to be digital writers by being digital writers ourselves. As we turn our attention to your classrooms throughout the rest of this conference, I invite you to think about how we can write beyond expectations as we compose our classrooms, and craft our digital writing workshops, both today and as technologies, students, and our culture continues to change.

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A smorgasbord of sessions from SITE 2010 with the notes I was able to catch from each (some more than others)… enjoy!

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

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