Digital Literacy Leadership Dare

Looking to the future of digital literacy (Flickr image from by Schlüsselbein2007)

This morning, on the final day of our digital literacy leadership workshop, we watched Chris Lehmann’s Ignite talk about “School 2.0,” and I borrowed some of his ideas to create our writing prompt: What do you dare to do as a digital literacy leader?

One of the themes that has emerged for me over the week, and especially at our dinner conversation last night, is that I have been doing lots with digital literacy just about everywhere in the education world — through the National Writing Project, in K-12 schools, in partnership with colleagues at other universities — but not much right here, on the campus of CMU. Perhaps a bit too aloof, I have often pushed off my lack of involvement here by saying that “I can’t be a prophet in my own land” or that the bureaucracy of the institution is too much.

Today, I am daring myself to do better, to be better. I am daring myself to be a digital literacy leader here, in my own backyard, on our campus. What might this look like.

  • Well, to begin, I will schedule time to talk with our director of composition and the director of the writing center, perhaps both together, to talk about digital literacy and multimodal composing.
  • Second, as we revise the English education curriculum, I will be more of an advocate for digital literacy in our courses and program as a whole.
  • Third, as I get involved with our department curriculum committee, I will also be thinking about possibilities for professional development as it relates to instruction and integration of technology.

I’m using Letter Me Later to send myself a note for later in the year, asking whether or not I have been proactive on these goals.

I hope you, too, digital literacy leadership dare!


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Response to 2016 MDE Assessment Survey

The Michigan Department of Education has issued a “2016 Assessment Survey” that I encourage every teacher and parent in our state to reply to ASAP.

There is a public hearing on the future of assessment in Michigan that will be held in Lansing on July 30th, but I can’t attend in person… so, I am sharing my thoughts here: Response to MDE 2016 Assessment Survey (PDF).

Please take time to do the same. The future of education in our state could change if we take this opportunity to break out of the stranglehold of standardized testing and, instead, move toward authentic assessment.


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Social Media, Educational Research, and “Keeping It Real”

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Join the KQED #TeachDoNow MOOC this summer!

This summer, I’m participating in KQED’s #TeachDoNow MOOC, though I am just a little bit behind the game. I finally caught up on the week one webcast, and I have been checking out the discussion board on Google+.  Later this summer, the week of August 11, I will cohost a webcast on the idea of “How do you manage learners, tasks, resources, and assessment in a connected learning environment?” There are many things happening in many places with this MOOC, and I am really intrigued how they are using Tagboard as a hub for collecting resources.

So much to think about! This, of course, is both the opportunity and a challenge of social media use in education. For the moment, however, I want to focus on the question of the week: What is the value of social media for your professional learning?

Of all the possible answers to this question that I might consider — such as finding resources that I can use in courses and workshops for preservice and in-service teachers, delving more deeply into the lesson ideas and unit plans of networked colleagues, or simply keeping my finger on the pulse of conversations around education — the biggest value for me, as an educational researcher and teacher educator, is simply making connections with K-12 colleagues.

There are many examples that I could cite, but I will share one that happened just this week. On Wednesday, I was presenting a session about growing your PLN at the Michigan Reading Association‘s summer literacy conference. In my session, one of the participants was an NWP teacher consultant from the Lake Michigan Writing Project, Erica Beaton, whom I hadn’t had a chance to meet in person, though we were connected on Twitter. She acted as a guide and mentor to others in my session as they were learning to use Twitter. I, in turn, then made the choice to attend her session on “creating hype for reading,” and posted numerous resources.

At the end of the session we were talking about possibilities for engaging readers with e-books. Though we only have a few moments, it turned into a lively conversation and Erica offered me an invitation to visit her classroom next school year. What had begun as a collegial, though semi-anonymous relationship on Twitter before the conference quickly blossomed into a new professional connection and, ultimately, will probably result in me visiting her classroom and — who knows? — perhaps even writing an article together or co-facilitating a conference presentation.

This is but one example of how social media contributes to my professional learning, specifically as an educational researcher and teacher educator. I am talking with teachers all the time, and many times those conversations begin on social media and result in sharing coffee or a meal together. As one Michigan colleague, Todd Bloch, recently reminded me, our K-12 colleagues rarely, if ever, actually see university researchers and teacher educators engaged in real conversations with teachers, visiting classrooms and attending the conference sessions. This continues to exacerbate the “ivory tower” divide between educational research and classroom practice, and he was appreciative of the fact that I present at conferences, visit classrooms, write with teachers, and participate in social media.

All of this is to say that social media — to use the popular phrase — “keeps it real” for me as a professor with deep roots in the K-12 classroom. Social media participation is a must for all educators, especially those of us who do educational research and are preparing the next generation of teachers. To do less is a disservice to the educators that we serve and to our own sense of what it means to be a professional.


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Many Thanks to Many Colleagues

Crafting Digital Writing Picture
Image from Janis Selby Jones’ blog “Write the World”

There are a few moments in one’s career where you pause long enough to say “thank you” to all your colleagues for all the opportunities that they have provided you.

So, I am taking one of those moments this morning to say thanks to the many teachers, students, fellow English educators, and friends that I get to collaborate with — especially those who helped me create my book Crafting Digital Writing — and to let them know that it has been selected as this year’s winner for the Richard A. Meade Award for Research in English Education.

I will create a much more detailed “thank you” speech for November, but for the moment I hope that this brief blog post captures my appreciation to the many people who helped bring this book together as well as to the hundreds of teachers who have read it, are reading it, or will be reading it at some point in the future. I say often how I am as busy as ever, but I am doing the work that I love to do — connecting with teachers and students — and I look forward to more opportunities for writing about those connections.


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