Digital Writing, Digital Teaching
The Homepage of Dr. Troy Hicks
Tools related to digital writing
Now, here is a great way to kill time and generate cool graphics for your blog:
Interestingly enough, the warning at the bottom of this image says “the images used for generating may be subject to copyright.”
Also interesting, as soon as I clicked away from the page, the temp image that was stored — and that I tried to blog above — disappeared. Save early, save often, I suppose…
Blogged with Flock
Thanks to the team at MSU’s Blogs for Learning for featuring my blog under their “User Submitted Blogs” list. This looks like it can become a great resource based on what they have described here:
What is Blogs for Learning?
Welcome to Blogs for Learning, an online resource about instructional blogging. The site provides students and instructors with information and resources about the technical and pedagogical aspects of blogging in the classroom.
Just this past week, I have had three different conversations with educators about how and why to integrate technology – especially read/write web tools – into projects that they are doing. A site like this can serve as a clearinghouse for information that teachers can use to justify blogs in their classrooms. They already have some great articles and tutorials about blogging, and I think that this will grow into a very helpful site.
One thing that is curious to me is the fact that you can’t get the RSS feed for the site off of the main page (I don’t get a chicklet in the address bar of Firefox or Flock). Rather, you have to click on their “Feeds” page and grab it from there. I would have figured it would be easier to get the feed than that.
At any rate, I hope to blog more about these conversations that I had this week – as well as submit a few of the great NWP blogs that I know about to the Blogs for Learning site – but we have to get to the cider mill and pumpkin patch before snow threatens to ruin our day. Ah, Michigan weather…
Blogged with Flock
Just a quick note to say that I’ve been enjoying the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast for the past few weeks. Here is a piece of the write-up from last night’s episode. Check it out.
Our conversation this evening began innocently enough with Gail Desler, the technology liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project in and around Sacramento, California, describing her work over the past four years with blogging in the classroom. Last year 3 different Writing Projects and 5 schools joined together in a project called “Youth Voices: Coast to Valley.†Given that we have stolen their name, “Youth Voices†in an attempt to broaden our network of schools, we are delighted to include Gail and her teachers in the elgg at http://youthvoices.net! Last night Gail said that some of the same teachers from last year’s work would be joining the new Youth Voices. A great question that Gail has been asking is, “How can we sustain and deepen online conversations on a blog?†And part of this has to do with finding the right balance between personal blogging and common blogging around a theme or text.
Blogged with Flock
So, the wiki debate continues. In the latest issue of AFT’s American Teacher, the pro and con discussion of the month is about Wikipedia. Here, in very stark terms, are what I consider to be very traditional views about the academic research process (Anderson) juxtaposed with a more reasonable interpretation of research, collaboration, and the changing nature of literacy (Locke). I want to look at how each of them define what it means to be a teacher of researchers (at the K-12 level) to make this point clear.
Dixie Anderson, a librarian, suggests that,
As educators, it is our responsibility to hold academic resources to the highest of expectations. We need to become role models in the research process. Credibility and responsibility are the two most important aspects of research. And teaching students the patience to delve into credible resources is the task and responsibility of the educator. We, as educators, cannot condone lazy techniques or unreliable research tools.
I read her comments to mean, essentially, this: we are the gatekeepers for students and, thus, can only recommend sources that the gatekeepers who monitor us (media, publishers, authorities) let us delve into because we can trust them. She makes the claim that “credibility and responsibility” are critical to good research, yet denies her students the opportunity to assess credibility and take responsibility for what they find in Wikipedia.
Then, in what I consider to be a very effective counterpoint, Teb Locke, a technology teacher and co-host of Teachers Teaching Teachers Webcast, refutes this idea. While he is not talking about Wikipedia per se, his argument makes sense in that context. He claims:
Further, wikis facilitate a defining feature of traditional scholarship: publication. Changes to a wiki are immediately “published†for the entire world to see. Not only does this provide a real-world motivation for students, it also allows them to experience writing and editing as a dynamic endeavor.
Unlike a more static writing process in which publication marks the end of revisions and the end of the process, wiki writing is instantly published while undergoing infinite revisions. The wiki therefore brings literacy and accountability to a whole new level. Students are not simply skimming for content, they are constantly evaluating from an editor’s point of view in order to improve what they are reading/publishing.
AFT – Pubs-Reports – American Teacher – October 2006 – Speak Out
Locke, in his example of having students write for a class wiki, describes the ways in which students become producers of knowledge, or texts, rather than just consumers. If we rely on the old model of research, where students bring empty note cards to be filled by drinking at the vessels of knowledge, then the argument that Andersen makes holds water. If, however, we recognize that students have, and will continue to have, multiple and conflicting sources from which to draw, then we realize that it doesn’t.
This, of course, doesn’t even scratch the surface about the cultural, social, political, racial, gendered, colonial, and economic critiques that one could make of most traditional research paper sources (encyclopedias, magazines, newspapers, and, wait for it… books) and the fact that even the most “credible resources,” as Andersen call them, all have a rhetorical purpose for creating the text they have. We seem to ignore rhetoric when it doesn’t serve us, however, I won’t go into that right now.
Suffice it to say that we need to stop looking at Wikipedia as an excuse to hold on to our out-dated mindset about what and where students learn as well as who they learn from.
Wikipedia helps us think about how and why, instead, a goal we should all be striving towards given the nature of knowledge, rhetoric, and the literacies our students use.
Blogged with Flock
Today for Critical Studies, we read a chapter from Peter Morville‘s Ambient Findability, “The Sociosemantic Web.” This chapter suggests that taxonomies are out, folksonomies are in, yet (given the choice) Morville says, “I’ll take the ancient tree of knowledge over the transient leaves of popularity any day” (p. 139). That was the one line of the text that confused most of us, given his overwhelming support of how links, tags, and other forms of metadata can contribute to our understanding of the web, but that was one of our only concerns.
A few things that the chapter raised, however, related to the ways in which we, as researchers and educators, find, use, and distribute knowledge, as well as what counts as literacy now. First, we talked about the ways in which we “traditionally” did research in school with 3×5 cards, encyclopedias, and card catalogs which then lead to a final, polished paper of regurgitated information. Today, students are (or, at least, they could be) working from Wikipedia, keeping Google Notebooks, checking out social bookmarks and blogs of others working on similar research, and creating collaborative reports with a wiki. In what ways does this challenge the traditional power structures evident in schooling, in general, and literacy education, in particular? Was there ever a “pure and good” way to do research, despite the clear and concise steps that we would like to believe comprises good research?
Second, the idea that the world was built on taxonomies and is now working in folksonomies (although we are not so sure there was ever a dichotomy) makes what we want students to do as literate citizens very different than what it used to be. It is no longer about memorizing one idea sequentially after another, but instead looking for connections — sometimes suggested by experts, sometimes by peers — and trying to synthesize ideas into something new and useful, not just to repeat it for a test. We talked about the list of genres represented in hypertext (p. 146) and the ways in which composing those texts on paper as compared to using hypertext drastically changes the task. In some ways, linking is the new way to create citations (although, looking at a list of someone’s references to see what to read next has been a skill that we’ve used before the Internet).At any rate, it was an interesting read and since Morville might be coming to campus later this year for a talk, I figured it would be good to write a little bit about his work now.
Aram alerted me to this article from the NEA which gives a pretty fair shake to wikis and Wikipedia. Here is a particularly compelling quote:
But with wiki technology, students can go beyond simply reading sites to helping write them as well, fulfilling the Web’s promise of becoming a fully interactive medium. According to Frey, whether or not Wikipedia is a reliable source is beside the point. Its value, he says, is in its collaborative nature. “It’s an organic product, it’s an interactive product, and it’s a community product,†he says. “You can’t compare it to traditional resources. It encourages us to accept that in today’s world, anyone can be a published author.â€
NEA: October 2006 NEA Today – Getting Wiki With It
Speaking of wikis, if anyone wants to help Aram and I prepare for a presentation next week, please check out our wiki page for the presentation. Thanks for your help.
Blogged with Flock
Most of you know about the Wired wiki story, I am sure, so this post is really for me to save this for posterity. And, perhaps one of the sessions that I am co-facilitating at NWP this November.
Hi Chris,
I just wanted to touch base with you about your Teach with Tech podcast. I have been listening for a few months and I appreciate how you discuss new technologies and contextualize them in K-12 and higher ed applications.
Just a quick comment on your Opera segment from last month. I have been an Opera user for a few years (yes, I paid for it a long time ago, before Opera 9, because I thought it was that good). Besides all the great tips that you gave (I didn’t even realize the one about the trashcan), you might also want to think about telling your faculty and students that there are some handy mouse features that you can use on a PC or Mac (if you have a 2 button mouse).
There are more mouse tools that I am sure are out there that I don’t even know, but these — along with the tips you offered — make my browsing life much easier.
Finally, I did want to say that I am becoming a regular wiki user. You can see how we used wikis in a similar manner to the teacher you described who asks students to keep class notes by looking at the collaborative agendas from our series of summer workshops. Also, a colleague and I are developing a presentation that we will give in October using a wiki.
For a future episode, I hope that you might consider talking about how teachers are integrating tools of the read/write web into the research process. Gone are the days of 3×5 cards, and now we have webquests, RSS for news feeds, Google Notebook, Citation Machine, Writely, and other tools for keeping track of research online as you write. I would like to hear the ways in which teachers are doing this kind of new research with students.
Keep up the great work on the Teach with Tech podcast!
Troy
Wikis as a collaborative and social writing tool – and not just a way for students to cheat by calling something “original” material or for someone to create truth through “wikiality” – are starting to come into the news. But, I don’t think it is enough. For instance:
Recently, Columbia University has begun to embrace the academic aspects of wikis. The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning has designed a number of wikis to facilitate conversation in classes, and members of the center are among the leading minds on wiki culture.
And yet meddlers, not just altruistic do-gooders, can also update the sites at will. So while the vast majority of Wikipedia’s information is correct and suitable for academic purposes, many students use it as much for procrastination as a tool for researching a paper.
What if a wiki could serve both purposes, however? Project Athena, a wiki in development through Columbia’s Student Government Office, is pursuing that goal. In its most basic form, it would begin as a brochure and then would evolve into an insider’s guide to which bathroom showers at the University have the head installed too low.
Depending on the amount of interference by the office, the site could eventually turn into a campus-wide study guide where users post their class notes, creating a massive form of Cliff’s Notes. (Those involved with the project are calling it a repository for general information on the University, not on classes.)
Wikis Find Their Way Into Academia
As I dig more and more into the aspects of collaborative writing that wikis – and other tools such as Writely – allow, I am more and more intrigued with the collective backlash that still seems to exist about them. The example above shows how it is OK for students to use the wiki to create “repository for general information on the University, not on classes.” Why not on classes? Why not, as others like David Warlick have suggested, ask students to start with Wikipedia and then create their assignments so that they have to verify the facts in the Wikipedia article and, ideally, contribute new knowledge to it.
I was even more surprised when I was working in a school earlier this fall, one that actually doesn’t filter and block Wikipedia, when the teachers told me that they not only don’t want students to use Wikipedia as a source, but that they actively steer students away from it. I asked why. Here is the general outline of the conversation:
After that, they kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, essentially, “Hmm, Wikipedia isn’t so bad. Maybe I will try using with my students this fall.” I hope that they do.
All that said, I am still interested in why and how to use wikis and where the resistance is coming from. Is it the fact that we, as educators, are having trouble making the paradigm shift as it relates to the read/write web and how knowledge is made and shared? There are many who think that this is the case, as change is slow in education. And, there are some interesting critiques of digital collectivism that I think warrant attention, Lanier’s essay being one of them.
But, the knee-jerk reaction that we, as literacy teachers, are going ban wikis outright – without talking about the skills embedded in reading and writing on a wiki – really concerns me. I hope to do some more thinking and writing about how we can effectively integrate wikis into the research process, but for now I would highly recommend looking at Paul Allison’s “Ninth Graders Composing on a Wiki” screencast and his students’ wiki. Also, you can look at a post that I used to facilitate a presentation about this topic last fall.
What do you all think? How can you integrate wikis, especially Wikipedia, into the research reading/writing process?
On a related note, you can visit the wiki page that Aram and I are using to facilitate our presentation at MCTE in a few weeks. And, I hope, add to it!
As we think about the types of writing we ask students to do in school, and whether or not they feel it is for a real audience and purpose, can it even come close to this?
Nick Barnowski is in multitask mode. His fingers dance around a keyboard, keeping up his end of the bargain in a back and forth two-way Instant Message conversation.
He stops momentarily, leans back in his office chair and trades glances between the flat panel monitor and his visiting afternoon appointment that sits across the desk from him.
A stack of business cards sits in a tray on the front of the desk, which takes up a portion of the home office where he spends much of his time. On the walls, his hockey-playing career is chronicled with framed team photos, sharing the same space with a larger photo of the Detroit Red Wings skating around the ice with the Stanley Cup in their possession.
Recently things have been hectic. There has been an online sports Web blog to update, television, radio and newspaper interviews to be done, e-mail correspondence to attend to, and of course, the sixth grade to complete.
That’s right. The owner of one of America Online’s most popular sports Web blogs is 12. As in four years shy of his driver’s license 12.
Lansing State Journal: Popular sports-blog writer is 6th-grader with a full schedule
The rest of the story is even more interesting, as it talks about Nicks experience as a writer and what his teacher, who subscribes to the blog, thinks about this, too. Earlier today, some ELA consultants were asking me how and why we might do workshops on blogging (and try to overcome the MySpace crisis), and I think that this is a good example of positive blogging that I will use in the future.
