Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Earlier this month, one of my students, Lynette Seitz, and I were interviewed by Heather Smith, CMU’s Assistant Director of Media Relations about technology literacy and our work in ENG 315 this semester.

I appreciate her invitation to record this podcast and it was wonderful to have Lynette’s voice in there, too, as a pre-service teacher who is thinking about incorporating digital writing into her classroom.

You can get the podcast through CMU’s channel in iTunes.

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

Here is an overview from the MSU LARC site:

Steve Graham, Vanderbilt University

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

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

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

About the Speaker:

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

And, here are some notes from the session:

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

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

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

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

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

My Reflections

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

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

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

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

The second in a series of workshops from NWPM colleagues at MRA 2008, these are notes from Portland Middle School teachers Amanda and Garth Cornwell’s session on “Partnering Students, Parents, and Teachers Through Technology.”

• Begin with questions from the audience:
  • How to get younger students to access technology on their own?
  • How do parents react, what do they want?
• Our Hopes
  • To demonstrate daily uses of technology that serve a variety of purposes
  • To aid students, parents, and colleagues in realizing the technology of potential
  • To equip students with the skills that they will need
  • Michael Wesch vide: “A Vision of Students Today“
• Our Plan
  • To share the tech tools that we use with students and parents
  • To discuss why it is important to integrate technology when we feel like we are “giving up” time for content
  • To discuss how flexibility is the key, because teaching with technology always yields surprises
• Students
  • Shared Drive
    • Create hotlists in word that students can click to for computer lab assignments
  • District Digital Dropbox
    • Track changes in word sometimes works with middle school students
  • Wikis
    • Amanda’s Class Wiki
  • Nicenet
    • Classroom discussion forums
    • Good for access at home and school, because it is all online and doesn’t require a specific word processor (files lost, incompatible formats, etc)
    • Watching for IM language and asking students to express themselves more clearly
  • Google Docs
  • Podcasting
    • Buy inexpensive MP3 recorders
• Parents
  • Blogs and Edline
  • Lack of participation and interest in training sessions
  • Considering teaming up with local libraries
  • Be persistent and specific
• Teachers
  • Open yourself up to learning with your students
• Our learning
  • Small, simple steps can be beneficial
  • Honor the time of the student, parent, or teacher coming to learn
  • Listen to input from students
• Lessons and Student Work
  • Book discussions

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is just barely spring break here (well, break at least, if not spring) and I am already turning my attention somewhat to the fall. I have been asked to adapt two existing CMU courses into ones focusing on digital writing. Here is what I have come up with so far:

ENG 460 - Current Issues in English: 21st Century Literacies

The study of English continues to evolve in the twenty-first century, based on changes in information communication technologies and the underlying social relations that they allow. Students in this course will explore print, oral, visual, digital, and critical literacies such as blogging, social networking, web-based collaborative writing, and multimedia authoring in relation to their own inquiry projects.

For this course, the main goal seems to be that students create a final research project, a capstone to their English major. So, I hope to attract students who are moderately interested in technology so that we can hit the ground running. I imagine that this group would go through many of the same steps that I am going through with my ENG 315 students this spring (starting a blog, wiki, and social network) and that they would quickly organize themselves around affinity groups. I would take special care to teach them about tools that would be useful in researching (social bookmarking, Zotero, Google Notebook, Scribe Fire) and the topics would largely remain their own, although I am sure that they would be influenced somewhat by the readings and technologies.

I am not sure what to use as a reading collection for this course (or the one below, for that matter). Right now, I am leaning towards only using open access journals and other web resources. Somehow, I want to use the MacArthur series on digital learning, although that could come in to play more in the other course.

Also, the main goal for students is to develop a quality research project, and I would act as a coach for that project. Thus, I need to think about a book that talks about research, yet in a way that makes it engaging and interesting. Right now, I am leaning towards The Craft of Research, although I don’t know if that is too “grad studentish” and if their might be something better for advanced undergrads.

ENG 402 - Rhetoric and Argumentation: Digital Rhetoric

By examining the histories, communities, and designs of digital spaces, this course will relate the rhetorical tradition of argumentation to contemporary rhetorics enabled by information communication technologies. Students will develop multimodal arguments based on issues such as online identity, the digital divide, intellectual property rights, gaming, civic engagement, and online communities.

For this course, I am going to build off the work of my dissertation director and mentor, Danielle DeVoss. She has an outstanding course in Digital Rhetoric already designed, and I would like to follow her lead in terms of the general direction of the course and the overall outcomes. As I mentioned above, I feel strongly that as much of the course material as possible will be open access, so I want to use the MacArthur series as touchstone for the units in this course.

I am also thinking about doing a digital literacy autobiography in this course, utilizing digital storytelling as a means for accomplishing that goal. Bonnie Kaplan and I are already talking about that. Also, I think that it will be important for this class especially (and maybe the 460 group, too), to be thinking about design issues. I just got the third edition of Robin Williams’ Non-Designers Design Book (with color!), and I am leaning heavily towards having my students investing in that text for this course.

Clearly, I will have to do some additional thinking for both of these courses in the months to come. If you have ideas about how I can make these courses stronger, I would really appreciate hearing them.

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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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Things are underway for the semester — I am looking forward to teaching ENG 315 again, and I made this quick video to welcome students to the class.

My daughter helped a bit, too. Enjoy!

PS — If anyone can help me figure out why I can’t embed YouTube videos in WordPress, that would be very helpful!

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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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Yesterday, our RCWP Project WRITE team had the good fortune of being able to work with NWP’s Director of Research and Evaluation, Paul LeMahieu, on an analytic writing continuum workshop. In his talk, which was similar to the session that I attended last summer, he talked about how the continuum has been developed, the pedagogical uses of it, and how we, as professionals who teach writing, need to not just tell those who value tests to “stop,” but to also offer them something better to use instead (we hope to post some notes on the session soon on the Project WRITE wiki).

Particularly useful for the Project WRITE teachers, as he talked about the different categories for assessment on the continuum (content, structure, stance, diction, sentence fluency, and conventions — modeled, with permission, after six traits), he also talked about how this structure of assessment works for most kinds of writing, but not all and not the least of which is multimodal writing. He mentioned how there are not really any models that explore how to assess multimodal composition and how, perhaps, we could develop one through this work in Project WRITE. That is a very exciting component of this project that I had not anticipated when we originally started, and I look forward to pursuing it more soon. (NOTE: I do think that Bernajean Porter has got our thinking moving in this direction for K-12 students, and put up some good criteria and an interactive rubric maker on her Digitales Evaluation site.)

Coincidentally, I have been chewing on this idea now for the past few days as I was trying to help my students in ENG 201 come up with criteria for evaluating their final multimodal projects. As I asked them to reflect on what they have been doing and how they have been working over the past few weeks on these projects, we talked on Tuesday about how the categories of the analytic continuum (which we have been using all semester) just didn’t quite line up with what they were thinking about in terms of what to earn a grade on. Along with some criteria for judging group member performance, they went back to our discussions earlier this semester about rhetoric, and we came up with the following ideas for grading this project:

• Ethos: the credibility of the author is established through professional language, use of appropriate sources, and evidence of author’s perspective (within or in addition to the main multimodal documents)
• Pathos: the texts make appropriate emotional appeals that both engage the reader and provide insight into the chosen topic
• Logos: the texts present a clear and coherent central idea, supported with appropriate evidence and argumentative strategies
• Content and Structure: the choice of mode and media support the message in the texts and elements of multimedia are thoughtfully integrated into the project rather than as a gratuitous add-on
• Design: the choice of design principles (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity) as well as rhetorical decisions (transitions, word choice, stance) combine to make an attractive and effective presentation

So, it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Students, in groups, will be assessing the other groups’ work and I will be throwing in my grade with the whole bunch to get an average. I haven’t graded anything multimodal yet, let alone a collaborative grading where students are involved in the process. I’ll write more about it once we are done, and look forward to hearing your ideas about how you are teaching and assessing multimodal writing, as well as any resources that you can point to about this messy, yet engaging, component of the writing process.

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Here we are in NYC for the NWP and NCTE annual meeting, and I am just now getting online with a reliable internet connection at a Food Emporium a few blocks from our hotel. I don’t have much time to write or post, but I did see this post from Michael Wesch with an explanation of his video, “A Vision of Students Today.” Please check out the entire post, but I thought that this chunk was timely given the focus of the NWP/NCTE work this weekend on 21st century literacies.

He has said in a few sentences what I have been trying to express for years, and I really admire his work. Check it out:

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » Clarifications on “A Vision …”

Students are learning to read, navigate, and create within a digital information environment that we scarcely address in the classroom. The great myth is that these “digital natives” know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online. They may be learning about this digital information environment despite us, but they are not reaching the levels of understanding that are necessary as this digital information environment becomes increasingly pervasive in all of our lives. All of the classic skills we learned in relation to a print-based information universe are important, and must now be augmented by a critical understanding of the workings of digital information.

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