Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

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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Last month, TechCruch featured a story on a new web-based tutoring service, PrepMe. I was contacted by Calvin Truong, PrepMe’s Operations Manager about writing a post on the service here in my blog. From the TechCrunch review, it sounds like a different take on the model of submitting a piece of writing only to have it graded by a computer, a model that many, including Nancy Patterson (in this month’s Language Arts Journal of Michigan) and  Maja Wilson, have been critical of:

Prepme is one online test prep company coming out of the University of Chicago’s business incubator. Founded in 2001, the company offers test preparation for the SAT, PSAT, and ACT, using an adaptive algorithm to customize the preparation course for each student.

Unlike Kaplan’s online offering, Prepme doesn’t calculate the best lesson plan once, but continuously as you work your way through the material. Their system keeps track of what questions you get right and wrong, working you harder on the types of questions you miss.

Additionally, customers can connect electronically, using real time chat, with high scoring college students who serve as tutors.

Source: TechCrunch, “Starts-Ups Change How Students Study for Tests,” 9/1/07

When Calvin wrote to me, he wondered if I would blog about PrepMe here. I replied with some initial concerns:

Prepme does seem like an innovative service that takes advantage of computerized scoring while still adding the element of human judgment. Most of the outright computerized scoring systems out there really worry me as a writing teacher (as well as turnitin.com), so this is a clear departure that blends technology and pedagogy…

… although I do think that your service is innovative, I am still concerned about writing items that seem to support computerize scoring, as many of the professional organizations that I belong to have statements that expressly condemn computerized scoring.

NOTE: After some closer reading, I should note that the writing itself appears to be scored by the tutors, while multiple choice items that are like those encountered on the ACT, SAT, and other tests are the ones being computer graded.

To continue the conversation, Calvin wrote back immediately, and with his permission, I share parts of that response here:

About your concerns, I completely understand, and I think we’re pretty in-sync on both points. We’re working on a few initiatives that would speak more generally to trends in education, and since we’re only grading multiple choice tests and hand grading essays to enable detailed feedback it seems we’re on the same page. I would expect there is much less resistance in using technology to automate grading multiple choice exams since this minimizes human error, but perhaps I’m mistaken on this.

As to the interesting trends that may be worth writing about, there are two that we’re working on that may be of interest. The first is our work with the State Dept of Education in Maine, and the second is more generally about what’s happening in online education.

Maine recently enacted legislation that required the SAT to graduate from high school. We’ve committed to a 3 year program with the Dept of Education where we provide free test prep to every public high school student in the state. Here’s a press release from the Maine DoE website: http://www.maine.gov/education/edletrs/2007/ilet/07ilet072.htm. This initiative is interesting in and of itself, and may provide fodder for an interesting discussion. As far as we can tell they’re doing it to not have to invest tremendous resources to create their own state standardized test and to also drive students to consider applying to college. It’s an interesting social experiment and we’re proud to be a part of it.

Another approach might be to talk about the general trend in online education of trying to find the sweet spot between scalability, quality, and cost. We believe that using technology to give you scale while having high quality services with tutors from top universities, at a significant cost advantage is the way to go. In the pre-college market, having tutors at top universities is a quality win because these are exactly the sorts of students that our users want to be and exactly the sorts of students that our parents want their children to be, and this fosters great relationships online. There is some inherent cost in this approach but we believe it’s worth it.

Clearly there are others out there that disagree — some go for the no-compromise in quality, 1-on-1, in person is the only way to go but that has tremendous cost and little scalability. Other companies are trying the low cost online model with outsourced tutors and we believe this sacrifices too much quality in favor of cost.

It may be interesting to consider the implications of this because what is commercially viable may not actually be what is the most pedagogically pure.

All in all, it was an eye-opening discussion and gives me hope that hybrid models of online grading with humans sharing their insights could be a way to go. In my initial training as an online instructor for our state’s virtual high school, it seemed as though we relied more on the multiple choice items and writing that was highly scripted, almost not requiring a human response (even though I was grading it). As we ask students to write and share their writing online, this is not the best model of them composing digital texts per se, but it is a model that we could consider using in our own classrooms to foster peer response on traditional texts in digital environments.

Also, it points to the need in our field to more fully analyze this phenomenon and come up with alternatives that we feel are viable. I am not an expert in the topic of computerized writing assessment, yet am becoming more familiar with the field. A search in Google Scholar for “computer based writing assessment” didn’t yield anything since 2003 (in the first ten pages of hits). The most recent an comprehensive article that I saw was Goldberg, Russel, and Cook’s “The effect of computers on student writing: A meta-analysis of studies from 1992 to 2002,” originally published in the Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment. (An article in the current issue, found after I accessed the JTLA website, “Toward More Substantively Meaningful Automated Essay Scoring,” looks interesting, too).

So, I thank Calvin for beginning this conversation, and giving me something more to think about as I evaluate my students’ writing this week (all of it submitted digitally, incidentally) and consider what else might help them become better writers in the future. I also hope that you — as teachers of writing — share your thoughts both in comments here and by emailing Calvin as well.

Inside Higher Ed shares some results from a recent survey of college students about their uses of technology. Among the more interest findings:

Instead, students appear to segment different modes of communication for different purposes. E-mail, Web sites, message boards and Blackboard? Viable ways of connecting with professors and peers. Same for chat, instant messaging, Facebook and text messages? Not necessarily, the authors write, because students may “want to protect these tools’ personal nature.”

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Students’ ‘Evolving’ Use of Technology

This trend reflects what I have been seeing in my classes this fall — many students are used to doing online research, will email me, and participate in Blackboard to the extent that I require it. The other tools for communication are popular amongst them, and I do not “invade” those spaces (for instance, even though I know nearly 100% of my students are on Facebook — because I asked them in class — I have not looked them up or tried to make them my friends).

What I find more compelling though is that many colleges and professors are not responding to the “sea change” (noted later in the article). Our digital natives may be able to use Facebook, but the article notes that using a tool like Google Docs is still seen as innovative for both students and professors. At risk of sounding a little self-congratulatory (but noting that much of what I do in my classroom comes from my colleagues in the NWP), I don’t understand how professors can not be using Google Docs or other read/write web tools. For instance, I have students (some of them at least) submitting papers to me through Google Docs and, later in the semester, will be composing collaboratively written papers in there. None of my students knew about Google Docs at the beginning of the semester, and I hope to have them all proficient at using it by the end.

At any rate, the final note in the article from the report was this:

The report also finds challenges in addressing skills gaps for using spreadsheets and CMS software, highlighting the need for colleges to provide instructional technology to bring students up to speed.

Indeed, this skills gap needs to be addressed in all classes, not just a Computers 101. We need to continue to offer contextualized and useful technology learning. For digital writers, at a minimum, that should include tasks like blogging, collaborative word processing, creating and collaborating in a wiki, tagging, social bookmarking, online citation managers, composing multimedia including video and audio, and giving and getting feedback in multiple formats (written and aural). I look forward to continuing to teach these skills in my courses and hope that the ECAR survey, like the annual Horizon Report, continues to push us in that direction.

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Digital Planet, and excellent program that is on the top of my podcast playlist each week (subscribe to it here), offers us some insights from Google about the future of their work with education:

GOOGLE SCHOOL

Could Google expand its empire into education as well?

Google is expanding into many fields such as advertising, mapping and television. But recently, the search giant’s head of research, Peter Norvig, also talked about plans to educate children.

Speaking at the Learning Technology for the Social Network Generation conference Peter Norvig proposed setting children free to develop their own learning, with a teacher taking on the role of assessor at the end of the project.

Google see their search engine as the primary search for this new free self education, but there are warnings about the use of unmoderated and undirected searches across the internet.

This couldn’t have popped into my podcast playlist at a more opportune time. As I have begun teaching at CMU this fall, I have been relying heavily on Google’s tools for running my classes, especially my Intermediate Writing course. (Why they don’t have their reader and notebook listed on that page, I don’t know).

At any rate, in thinking about how my course is structured and what I hope for students to learn, I ended up drawing a concept map of the course and then created two screencasts: one describes my overall vision for what they will do and learn in the course while the other demonstrates how a particular student interested in a topic (I chose marketing as an example) might do his/her work in the course.

This whole process — taken in context of the Google interview — has been an engaging intellectual exercise and makes me think that I should have done a course map at the beginning. Since I am asking them to both use technology and examine its uses at the same time we are writing and examining how writers write, I think that some of their concerns, questions, and confusions are warranted. I hope that this diagram, as well as my screencasts, help them think through the possibilities for the course. Some that I am think of, in relation to Google tools, are:

• To use Blogger to post critical responses as well as give and get feedback on their responses
• To use Google Docs to share drafts with me and peers; to develop parts of their final group project
• To use Google Notebook as a way for me to comment on their blogs in a private space and keep a running list of comments
• To use Google Notebook as a way to document their own research
• To use Google Scholar to find articles for their research
• To use Google Reader to identify blogs, news sites, and Google news alerts about their topics

Of course, there are tools other than Google’s that we will be using, like Wikispaces, del.icio.us, and Zotero, but this is where my thinking is at right now for the beginning of the semester. I am hoping that this multiliteracies approach to reading, researching, and writing will help scaffold students into writing within their disciplines as well as learn how to use digital tools for productive purposes. I feel that they are starting to understand what I mean when I say that I define “composition” broadly, and all the groups are developing some great topics (check out their brainstorming from our wiki homepage).

I look forward to hearing what they think about the course map, screen casts, and this Google interview.

It’s been about a year since I’ve seen an article like this pop up — perhaps it has to do with going back to school and all the negative ideas that technology can bring in relation to the state of our language and culture:

The walls between the school and the cellphone or computer screen are permeable, and the key is to get students thinking about language so it’s used intentionally and effectively in context, says Florida State’s Yancey. “Language users will take a practice from one setting and take it to another. That’s the nature of language. What I really hope is that people will translate appropriately.

“It’s like flip-flops, she says. “There’s nothing wrong with flip-flops, worn at the appropriate time in an appropriate way. But soccer players don’t wear flip-flops in a game.”

15 years after birth, book’s not closed on texting - USATODAY.com

I find this particularly interesting right now as I am reading Postman’s Technopoly with my ENG 201 class. His basic argument is that technology becomes culture and thus an all-consuming march towards progress that we don’t question. So, I do sometimes appreciate those who question why and how new literacies like IMing are changing our language (even if I disagree with the principle behind the question).

Also, it reminds me that I need to be very conscious of what technologies I choose to use in my teaching and research, how I explain those choices and technologies to others, and to reevaluate them in light of how well they worked for the task at hand. IMing, for instance, is not useful as a genre for the types of writing that we are doing in the ENG 201 class, but is interesting as a subject of research.

You can see more of what my students are writing about related to Technopoly in their blogs, which you can link to from here.

Blogged with Flock

Things have been absolutely crazy the past two weeks, but that has been good for me especially as I get back in the swing of teaching. As I begin the semester, there are a few things that I’ve been thinking about that I want to capture here and come back to think about more later.

First, in my writing class, the students have pretty much jumped up to each new technology that we try. On the first day of class, we began a wiki and I had students post some intro material there. This week, we created Google accounts and got set up with Blogger and Google Reader. All this is leading them to create their own research agendas, affinity groups for a multimodal presentation, and to become writers in their professions in the 21st century. Based on their initial surveys, there was a wide range of tech skills, and they are willing to help one another in the classroom, so that is good. Based on what I have seen, this will be a very “school 2.0″ type of experience for them.

Second, in my methods class, we began a wiki, too. Unlike my writing class in which things are organized more thematically and students will have some choice about the types of writing that they do, I have to organize this class around a slightly more structured curriculum. That said, there is still lots of room for flexibility and I will be inviting them to do some digital composition as well. They, like the writing class, were a bit apprehensive at first about writing on the wiki, but in an activity tonight, they were doing quite well. In fact, one student synthesized a few lists of responses from separate groups on one page without being asked (as we learned last week that overwriting can be a problem). I also showed them Google Docs, and some seemed intrigued. So, we might go in that direction a bit, too.

All of this is just to say that I have been reminded again and again about taking things in slow, manageable chunks. One student half-joked that she was thinking about dropping the writing course after the first day (she didn’t, thank goodness, and did well today setting up her blog). It reminds me that some students know quite a bit about this and can help others. And, for everyone, it is nice to have reminders and tutorials; thus, I am going to look for tutorials on YouTube for everything that we do so they can go back to it later to be reminded (or, perhaps, I will make my own with Jing).

At any rate, this has me very excited about the semester and the fact that students are taking to the school 2.0 kind of learning. I appreciate all the podcasts, blog postings, and one-on-one coaching that my colleagues have provided to me so I can be at this point — and look forward to sharing thoughts back here. More to come as the semester progresses.

Happy back-to-school (2.0) to all of you!

The month of August has brought a number of transitions, not the least of which is that I begin teaching at CMU next week. There are two courses that I will be doing this fall; one is a writing methods course for K-8 pre-service teachers and the other an intermediate composition course. More on composition next week, but for now I thought that I would post some of my thinking about writing methods as I created my syllabus.

I must say that sections of this intro to the course are taken from my department chair, Marcy Taylor’s syllabus, but I have added a few things. I forgot how much a syllabus can, in a sense, be a teaching philosophy of sorts, and I really enjoyed crafting this introductory part of the document. In my next post (and once I have the assignment refined a little more), I will post what I plan to call the “Educational Contexts Multigenre Research Project.” For now, here are some of my thoughts on writing and teaching writing, as represented in my syllabus  for this fall’s class.

Course Overview
In “The Neglected ‘R’: The Need for a Writing Revolution,” the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges begin their report by claiming that

Writing is how students connect the dots in their knowledge. Although many models of effective ways to teach writing exist, both the teaching and practice of writing are increasingly shortchanged throughout the school and college years. (2003, p. 6)

Given this national context, we will explore models of teaching writing while attempting to understand why and how writing is being “shortchanged” in our schools. A complex task, teaching writing requires that we understand why and how people choose to write, what methods are appropriate in certain situations, how social-cultural and cognitive factors play into individual writing processes, and the effects of newer technologies and multiple literacies on what constitutes “good” writing instruction.

Good writing instruction requires more than following a textbook. A trusted scholar and practitioner, Lucy Calkins offers a vision for what it means to be a teacher of writing:

If our teaching is to be an art, we must draw from all we know, feel and believe in order to create something beautiful.  To teach well, we do not need more techniques and strategies as much as we need a vision of what is essential.  It is not the number of good ideas that turns our work into art but the selection, balance and design of those ideas. (1994, p. 3)

Thus, this course is designed to help you make wise decisions about the “selection, balance and design” of writing in your elementary-level classrooms. Think of it as a workshop; the emphasis will be on creating and critiquing ideas about writing pedagogy through a hands-on approach. It is designed to focus on five basic areas of preparation:  your own writing; reading and discussion; working with children in the classroom; creating teaching materials; and written reflection on the first four.

Methods courses can never be only about “methods” or lesson planning alone. Many students expect to get a “bag of tricks” or “set of strategies” from the class that they can simply take and use directly as lessons in their classrooms. This is reasonable. Because you are anxious to get out and have your own classroom, I can understand why you may be impatient with what you see as theory or “busy work.” My goal is that you come to realize is that “theory” is all you have with which to filter the events of the classroom; you won’t know what to do completely until you get there. Think of this class as offering a theory, an approach, to writing instruction, one that will define writing and literacy in a broad manner.

For that definition, we turn to Anstey and Bull who offer us a vision of what literacy pedagogy, when deeply and critically theorized, can look like:

[L]iteracy pedagogy must teach students to be flexible, tolerant of different viewpoints, and able to problem solve, analyse situations, and work strategically. They must be able to identify the knowledge and resources they have and combine and recombine them to suit the particular purpose and context. Consequently, school classrooms and teachers’ pedagogy must encourage, model, and reflect these sorts of behaviours. The content and pedagogy of literacy programs must reflect the literate practices of local to global communities and equip students for change. Educators cannot hope to teach students all they need to know, as this will change constantly. But teachers can equip their students with the knowledge, skills, strategies, and attitudes that will enable them to meet new situations and cope with them. (2006, p. 18)

No small task, indeed. Learning how to teach writing may involve unlearning how you were taught writing. It may challenge your conceptions of what a “good” writer is and should be able to do. Thus, the focus of this course will be on practicing the strategies of a writing workshop approach as filtered through the multiple lenses of curriculum and pedagogy, practice and theory. This applies to both traditional written texts (e.g., stories, essays, and poems) and those composed with newer technologies and in multiple media (e.g., hypertexts, audio, video, and other multimedia).

One of the most fundamental tenets that scholars in our field argue is that teachers of writing need also to be writers. It is my goal as your teacher to help you become both a better writer and teacher of writing in different genres, for different purposes, and across various audiences. By the end of the course, you will believe the mantra, “I am a writer.”
References

• Anstey, M., & Bull, G. (2006). Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies. Newark, Del.: International Reading Association.
• Calkins, Lucy. The Art of Teaching Writing. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994.
• National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges. (2003). The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution. Available: www.writingcommission.org/prod_downloads/writingcom/neglectedr.pdf

Monday, we will be discussing the Writing Next Report, issued by the Alliance for Excellent Education. Here are my thoughts on the prompt, “How has reading the Writing Next Report encouraged you to rethink aspects of your teaching practice?”

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The Writing Next Report, written by Steve Graham and Dolores Perin, issued earlier this year by the Alliance for Excellent Education as a report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, outlines 11 teaching strategies that improve student achievement in writing. The report is a meta-analysis of dozens of quantitative studies that allow for the calculation of an “effect size,” or “the average difference between a type of instruction and a comparison condition” (p. 13). More on the measurement process and research method in a moment, but first a look at the results of the study.The authors of the report suggest eleven writing strategies that “are supported by rigorous research, but that even when used together, they do not constitute a full writing curriculum” (p.4). This point merits particular attention as one reads the list of strategies and thinks about what good writing teachers do as well as how and why they implement those strategies. That said, the list of strategies reads like a “greatest hits” of instructional techniques that a teacher can implement in his or her classroom (hence the warning not to call this list a curriculum). Here is the list, taken verbatim from the report, pages 4 and 5 (and I have listed the effect sizes at the end, the larger the better):

1. Writing Strategies, which involves teaching students strategies for planning, revising, and editing their compositions (.82)
2. Summarization, which involves explicitly and systematically teaching students how to summarize texts (.82)
3. Collaborative Writing, which uses instructional arrangements in which adolescents work together to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions (.75)
4. Specific Product Goals, which assigns students specific, reachable goals for the writing they are to complete (.70)
5. Word Processing, which uses computers and word processors as instructional supports for writing assignments (.55)
6. Sentence Combining, which involves teaching students to construct more complex, sophisticated sentences (.50)
7. Prewriting, which engages students in activities designed to help them generate or organize ideas for their composition (.32)
8. Inquiry Activities, which engages students in analyzing immediate, concrete data to help them develop ideas and content for a particular writing task (.32)
9. Process Writing Approach, which interweaves a number of writing instructional activities in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities,writing for authentic audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing (.32)
10. Study of Models, which provides students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate models of good writing (.25)
11. Writing for Content Learning, which uses writing as a tool for learning content material (.23)

These strategies, as a whole, represent most (if not all) of what I have come to understand comprises good writing instruction. To that end, I am pleased to know that my theoretical orientation towards the field aligns with the experimental evidence about “what works” in good writing instruction. In particular, I am glad to see that writing strategies and collaborative writing rank so high, although it makes me wonder why the process approach ended up toward the bottom of the list. This makes me wonder if they, unlike Katie Wood Ray, are making a distinction between the writing process and writing workshop, and I am guessing that they are not.

Even though Graham and Perin reiterate that this is not a curriculum, I have to wonder if some teachers, schools, districts, and states, could see it as such and “require” teachers to use each of the strategies in a writing program. Like the writing process/workshop distinction above, there are other parts of the report that do not represent the richness of discussions in our field (such as moving beyond word processing into other forms of digital writing or thinking broadly about writing to learn strategies), and I feel that the over reliance on only quantitative data may be limiting some of the implications and, in turn, potentially lead to implementation plans that are not complete.

All that said, the report is useful to me in my teaching in many ways. As a teacher educator, I think that this report can certainly offer evidence of the many practices that I use that stand up, for better or for worse, in a “scientifically-based” study. Thus, when I use these approaches in my teacher education courses and professional development workshops, I can point to the effect size data and suggest that these strategies have been integrated in a variety of contexts, yielding strong results. In other words, it can bring empirical merit to many of my theoretical practices, and the practices I share with other teachers.

As a writing teacher, this report encourages me to reconsider some ideas that I have neglected for some time. I do appreciate that Graham and Perin discussed the negative influence of explicit grammar instruction (p. 21) as it affirms my beliefs and synthesizes a number of good studies that have happened over the years, thus bringing (what we hope might be) a final curtain on the “should we teach grammar in isolation” argument. Also, the processes of summarization and sentence combining remind me — as someone who will be teaching a college writing class this fall — that not all students know how to do these tasks, or do them well. Modeling summary writing and sentence combining could offer some variety to my lessons as well as teach useful writing skills.

In sum, the Writing Next Report was useful to read as it confirmed many of my beliefs about teaching writing with statistical evidence while reminding me of the other aspects that I need to reintroduce into my practice. It also is encouraging to see these practices as the ones held up as “good” for writing instruction because, perhaps, those who works with assessment of writing might be able to think about how to measure these aspects of writing, not just the final product, which is so valued right now.

The questions that we have collectively explored the past two days leave me with many thoughts, which I will get to in a moment. First, I need to synthesize this weekend with the other working retreat that I recently attended — the CEE Leadership and Policy Summit in Chicago.

Having had two weeks to reflect on that meeting, I think that its essential purpose was two-fold:

1. How do we, as a professional organization of English Educators, induct new members into our field and give them the material and emotional support that will help them succeed?
2. In what ways is the nature of our work changing and how can we respond to as well as be at the forefront of those changes?

What I took from that meeting — and am still working on from it — is that we, as a field, need to begin articulating our positions on what have previously been controversial or taboo subjects and, whether we all completely agree on the position or not, have something to rally around and begin focusing our attention towards. Issues like the achievement gap, restructuring doctoral programs, addressing globalization, teaching literature, and others are all broad enough that we could gain some consensus and need to do so.

In many ways, I think that this weekend is similar to the work of the CEE Summit in that we are trying to capture the state of the field related to wrting with technology (nature of the work) and figure out how to share best practices in the teaching of digital writing with other teachers (induction). There is at least one significant difference between NWP and CEE that I need to address first, and then I will explain how I think we might mobilize in a similar way.

My understanding of the NWP is that we can not, by our very nature as a federally funded program, take a specific advocacy role on issues in the same way that NCTE/CEE can as a non-profit organization. That said, I think that there are many things that NWP can say, definitively, about the nature of digital writing in K-12 classrooms and teacher professional development (based on the work represented here this weekend) that NCTE (or, to my knowledge) any other network of teachers can make claims about.

In other words, we need to use the momentum from this weekend to clearly and concisely say something to all the sites in our network, the field of education, policy makers, and the general public about the nature of writing, how it is changing, the roles that literacy can play in empowering youth, and why the work that we have done in this tech initiative matters.

If NWP was willing and able to produce a book entitled “Because Writing Matters” or “Writing For a Change” — and those books are seen within the scope of our mission and not stretching our advocacy role — then I think that we need to begin thinking about a book such as “Because Digital Writing Matters” or “Learning Multiliteracies and Enacting Change.” We have the case studies, research, and capacity to do this. All that we need to figure out now is how to get started.

Opening Thoughts - Day 2

• Dixie Goswami - Bread Loaf
• Think about a follow up conference in 2009 that would invite the young people with whom we are working to attend as well. The literacy that our young people are learning is collaborative; every talk that I have heard shows that the students are the primary source about technology tools and making meaning with one another.
• We need to figure out how we, as professionals, can invite our young people into this work so we can learn from them. Shirley Heath used to remind us that students are resources to be developed, not problems to be solved. The conversation is shifting, and we will move that shift and critique the technology tools that we use.
• The next time we convene, we will have young people who will be able to be “advocates and activists.” We need to think about students as co-researchers by reinventing the mission of teacher research so we work closely with students to find out from them and with them the meaning of what they are doing with technology.
• Years ago, we brought boxes and boxes of student work that took us the whole summer to go through. yesterday, in Renee’s sessions, she went through interviews, transcripts, videos, and other materials that made it instantly possible to see what was happening.
• Also, we don’t have to find publishers that demand certain formats for scholarly work. The only limit for sharing your work and calling it scholarly research is your own time, creativity, and ability to get it on the internet.
• There could not be a more exciting time than now. The presentations that we have watched in the past two days represent the tip of the iceberg. The school, community, colleagues, and other factors makes the ecology of technology is something that we need to look at more as well. There is a huge base of research that must be done to show how classroom practice happens, how it is formed, and what allows it to happen.
• Five, ten years ago, we would have been talking about technology tools. We don’t define the digital divide in terms of who has access to tools. Now, we are looking at which kids have the kinds of opportunities to network in school and how we are intervening in those process. The infrastructure is important, but you are asking the hard questions that culminate in the hard questions. It is not a question of whether we teach, but how we do it well.
• The big digital divide is not looked at as equipment, but opportunities for students to participate in a participatory culture. What does this mean? The challenges, risks, ethical perspectives that need to be brought to all of this mean that we can not afford to have increasing numbers of young people to be media makers only through popular culture outside of schools. Thinking about this is an incredibly complex task.
• What do classrooms look like? How do we intervene in policy?
• Karen McComas - Marshall University WP
• Starting with Renee’s first graders yesterday reminded me of what is important about what I do. I teach far more than content and I try to create an environment in which change can happen.
• Yesterday, Jackie’s list of truisms reminded me of another set of truisms that I found a few years ago from a 1998 keynote from Neil Postman. Five things:
• All technological change is a trade-off. As I bring in something new, I leave something out.
• The advantages and disadvantages of technology are never distributed evenly across the population. However, if we wait until everyone has it, we will stand still for an eternity.
• In every technology, there are two or three powerful ideas. My task, as a teacher, is to identify an utilize them.
• Technology change is additive. All things change, not just the technology
• Media tend to become mythic. We need to research it.
• Katie Wood Ray tells us that writing workshop is not easy, and not everyone can do it. I feel the same about technology and teaching with technology.
• I left my SI people with a prompt on Friday, and I wanted it to affront them. “Given the demands of the modern age, and the demands on our children’s future, is it really OK to as whether or not they can use technology in their teaching?”
• Liz Davis - DC Area WP
• I completed the institute in 1995 and was worried about technology in the classroom. In 1999, I attended a conference on the digital divide that focused on race, gender, and power. I learned a few things at this conference as I prepared to present at it.
• As I read Damico’s article, I thought more about new literacies and the way that we are moving from an ideological model to a multilitercies model. For my students, seeing the differences from home to school were not always seen as assets, but as deficits.
• Our classrooms and the ways in which we see students have been a hindrance in my ability to teach at the highest level of expectations. I teach the poorest students in Washington DC. Asking them to bring their lives into the classrooms has been something new for me.
• Yet, from bringing their lives out of the margins of my lessons has made a difference in the way I teach. When we talk about multimodal meaning making, we have to think about all the risks in doing that. Whose language has the most power? Whose literacy is valued the most, defined as standard?
• This brings into your classroom and teaching many questions that are difficult and you may not be ready to deal with.
• Damico’s article brings many questions about the technology and the ways the students learn. Yesterday, as I listened to Renee’s students, I recall the conversation that happened at my table. We automatically began thinking about why students were worried about the story’s plot, and we began looking at issues of race, class, and power. At some point, the students may have derailed the lesson, but maybe questioning what we teach is a good thing as they critically analyze what they are learning in school.
• Learning is about liberation (Friere). If students are able to take what they learn in the classroom, in the long run they should take what they have from their home, community, and streets, and then move it to a level of application that is real and applicable to them, then do we need to teach other R’s? Resistance? Revolution? Rising Up?
• I am quite excited about the direction the local and national writing project that are going. We need to take control of how we design the language of what they learn, then corporations will make it happen for us.
• Janet Swenson - Red Cedar WP
• An Old, Slightly Sea-Sick Messenger Looks at a New Media, New Literacies World
• Clifford Geertz — Tacking near, tacking far
• We need to look very closely at the phenomenon, yet then move back and look at the larger social, economic, political systems in which they are embedded.
• When the problems are very complex, we should do this often, hence the “sea sickness” of tacking in and out so quickly
• Now that we have a shared understanding of the case studies, we need to look at the common and uncommon aspects of the work.
• New tools: MP3 recorders
• New sites: social networks
• New compositions: Google Docs
• I think that now we need to tack even further away from the shore and think about the larger implications of schooling.
• Derek Bock, Our Underachieving Colleges
• As a result of participating in college, are we giving them an opportunity to acquire a meaningful vision of life, develop their character, improve their minds, address important questions about who we are and what we should become, become more critical and reflective individuals, lead full lives and complete human beings?
• How do we contextualize what we are seeing in this broad landscape?
• Some things that technology offers is a rebottling (digital scrapbooking) but Potin of MIT is worried about whether our students are only skimming the surface and not doing the deep diving that transforms lives and communities?
• Share a video: Hero in the Hallway
• Will Banks - Tar River WP
• Freewrite from a few nights ago about how what we have been thinking has challenged us. Courtney has asked us to be careful with our language.
• Paul used the term “blog” and Cessi used “electronic exchange” and there are social networks. Is what we are exploring hte confulence of things?
• Literacies are becoming relational in that things are hypertextual, and not always evident. They are much more complex and chaotic than even HTML of just a few years ago.
• This emerging set of literacies has to do with engaging chaos.
• Can these textual events be taught? What do we learn from them? Can the texts give answers to the questions we have?
• These literacy events and our occasioning these events seem to emerge rather than exist? How do you teach this?