Category: Choice and Inquiry

Open Letter to Educators: (Re)Defining Digital Learning Day

Dear Educator:

Tomorrow (well, technically today by the time I am done writing this) is the second annual Digital Learning Day.

Cool. I’m all for digital learning, as the title of my blog implies.

But, as we prepare for the onslaught of tweets, blog posts, videos, webinars, and other celebrations, it is worth exploring the definition of “digital learning” that the group is promoting, as well as the background of the Alliance for Excellent Education’s president, Bob Wise. Understanding a little more about each of these components for the day should, I hope, give you a better understand of why it is happening.

First, the definition, straight from their website:

Digital learning is any instructional practice that is effectively using technology to strengthen the student learning experience. Digital learning encompasses a wide spectrum of tools and practices, including online and formative assessments, increased focus and quality of teaching resources, reevaluating the use of time, online content and courses, applications of technology in classrooms and school buildings, adaptive software for students with special needs, learning platforms, participation in professional communities of practice, access to high-level and challenging content and instruction, and many other advancements technology provides to teaching and learning.

In this sense, I read the definition of “digital learning” to mean content that can be delivered to students at a low-cost and, presumably, without certified teachers in place to facilitate their learning. Or, as Michigan Governor Rick Snyder calls it, “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way Any Pace.” The fact that teaching is only mentioned twice (one of those times as an adjective) and “teacher” is never mentioned should be of concern.

And, as a number of educational historians, most notably Larry Cuban, have pointed out, when there is no teacher buy-in with technology or technology-based efforts at reform, very little if anything changes. This line of thinking is very much with the proposals that organizations like iNACOL (one of DLDay’s partners) through their federal policy frameworks have proposed to essentially eliminate teachers and fuel public education dollars into private, online corporations.

Also, there are number of buzzwords and phrases in this definition that should raise the eyebrows of anyone who follows educational reforms efforts. Phrases like “online and formative assessments” is certainly a nod to the impending PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments, which will be relying on computer scoring of writing, rather than informed, teacher-led assessments. The phrase “learning platforms” also barely hides a thinly disguised approach to curriculum delivery that is, at best, a type of self-paced credit recovery option coming in the form of programs like e2020 and Read 180. Finally, the euphemism “communities of practice” is code for teacher groups that are formed under the guise of choice and interest, but usually are created to fulfill a school’s need for performance to meet AYP goals, not genuine inquiry through teacher research.

Lastly, it is worth noting that Bob Wise, who teamed with Jeb Bush for the first Digital Learning Day let year, remains the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, the main sponsor of DLDay. Despite his Democrat party affiliation, it is worth noting that Wise is an advocate for digital learning who has shared his views in conservative forums such as the Mackinac Center. Lastly, and perhaps most concerning, Bob Wise has close ties to ALEC and many other organizations tied to the corporate educational effort movement.

All of this hubbub about DLDay thus raised major concerns for me — as a teacher, teacher educator, author, consultant, and parent. As I look towards tomorrow and the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of educators that will participate in Digital Learning Day, I wonder what we are truly celebrating?

Kids?

Creativity?

Real, authentic learning?

Contrast that paragraph full of edu-jargon quoted above and compare it with what happens when authentic assessment, student centered technology interfaces, and teacher driven inquiry guide digital learning that happens in places and spaces like NWP’s Digital Is and the DML Hub, through conferences like EdCamp and EduCon, or other affinity groups that coalesce through twitter or other social networks like Connected Learning. There is great digital learning going on out there, but not necessarily in the spaces or formats that DLDay actively promotes through their corporate partnerships and special interests.

So, what do you plan to do as you celebrate Digital Learning Day this year?

While I certainly encourage everyone to participate, I also strongly suggest that you think about the message you are sending in relation to digital learning: who has power and agency? Who has access? Who is accountable, and for what reasons? Are we talking about students, teachers, and parents working toward a common goal of universal literacy and civic engagement?

Or, is this just another corporate effort at “reforming” education into another line in their profit ledger?

However you celebrate DLDay, you have the power to show what digital learning is and can be, not just what corporations and politicians tell us it should be.

Use your power — and hashtags — wisely over the next 23 hours.

Update on February 7, 2013: Minor editing/typo changes. 

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Teacher Leadership and Digital Writing

Wordle of Initial Thinking from CAWP Professional Development Workshop
Wordle of Initial Thinking from CAWP Professional Development Workshop

This weekend, I began working with teacher leaders from the Columbus Area Writing Project on the hybrid course we are calling “Teacher Leadership in Teaching Digital Writing.”

I’ve been fortunate enough to make many trips to Columbus in the last few years, and look forward to having this opportunity to work with these NWP colleagues as they prepare for their two-week Summer Institute as well as advanced institute for teacher leadership in digital writing.

We began Friday night by looking at one of Clay Shirky’s TED Talks, and in thinking about the implications for our classrooms and professional development work, specifically as it relates to the changing environments and expectations for writing in an era of the common core standards. This initial conversation generated a number of inquiry questions and ideas including thoughts about how we can value the principles of good writing instruction over technology tools as well as how we can invite our colleagues into these broader conversations about the changing nature of literacy.

We then went on to identify a number of our concerns through the “yeah but, yes and” activity used by many theater companies, and more recently as a training exercise for MBA students. We ended Friday evening by generating a list of potential technologies to explore together over the next few weeks, including Google Communities where we had already begun a conversation.

This morning we began by looking a the chapter I’ve been writing about our experiences in the Chippewa River Writing Project end how we have positioned ourselves as an “digital writing project,” embedding a variety of technologies and new literacies into our practices. While generally complementary, we were also able to generate a thoughtful discussion about how technology can have positive — and potentially negative — influences on teacher identity, and how sharing work publicly online can affect the ways in which teachers express themselves and choose to write.

The remainder of the day was devoted largely to a deeper exploration of the technologies that participants identified Friday night as being potentially valuable for our work together over the next few months. In particular, we delved deeper into the possibilities with Google+, Twitter, and Flipboard. Here are some of our notes:

  • Google+
    • Advantages
      • Easy integration with all Google services
      • Easy to add members
    • Drawbacks
      • Conversations get lost quickly from home page/lack of threading
      • No way to upload documents easily
      • Being in real time is a challenge in certain situations
    • Hangout
      • Possibilities for conversing with more than one person
      • Having a much larger group work, writing groups
      • Someone is in their classroom, in their school and they want some feedback from other people who are in other places
      • Documenting and saving the comments and responses
      • Moving beyond Skype to use as a way to collaborate across classrooms
      • Get together on early-release days with cross-school teams
      • Giving an oral presentation and receiving feedback from the chat room
      • Connecting with kids outside the classroom
      • Creating a panel of experts
  • Twitter/Chats
    • Hootsuite
    • EngChat
    • Twitter
      • Constraints of space make you choose what you are going to write and share; gets to the essence
      • Connect quickly with people whom you would never connect
      • Who you choose to follow — finding the educational resources — who am I choosing to follow, and why?
  • Flipboard/RSS

The three books that we are going to read are:

  • Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. First ed. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
  • Rheingold, Howard. Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. The MIT Press, 2012.
  • Warschauer, Mark. Learning in the Cloud: How (and Why) to Transform Schools with Digital Media. Teachers College Press, 2011.

Overall, I feel like this initial plunge into digital writing and teacher leadership was a successful one. As we concluded the day today, they generated a number of additional ideas and inquiry questions:

  • What leads to and then feeds thriving digital writing communities for students and for teachers (and are those the same thing)?
  • How do we put everything together in a coherent, usable way?
  • How do I act as a learner and a leader at the same time? What is the balance of teaching and learning at the same time?
  • Where do I find the time to learn it and then be able to teach it? Giving myself permission to be less than expert in it.
  • If you are working with in-service or pre-service teachers, how do you address the tension between the teaching of writing and the learning of the tools?
  • The potential for balancing potential use with triviality — how do we sort out and sift through what is trivial and a waste of time as compared to what will lead to meaningfulness and depth?

Over the next few weeks, we will be meeting once a week via Hangout or Twitter chat to share our experiences, discuss readings, and think about plans for their site as they create future professional development opportunities. At some point in the near future, I am hoping that we will be able to make some of our work public, and this is certainly a rich experience for me as well as I think about future models for professional development and learning and hybrid or mostly online scenarios.

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Opening the Conversation on Digital Mentor Texts

Just about a week from now, a number of us will be blogging about mentor texts in the digital writing workshop. Inspired by this announcement and reflecting on her own experience with integrating digital writing into her work as a librarian, Buffy Hamilton offered me many things to think about in a recent blog post on The Unquiet Librarian. She outlines a thoughtful approach to why and how she is integrating digital writing into her library curriculum, and leads into a series of great questions/points, three of which I will quote from and respond to here because I see them as intricately intertwined and important to our work as teachers of digital writing:

I felt frustrated in the professional books I read this fall in that they never seemed to address concrete strategies for scaffolding the digital composition process or effective assessment strategies.

How do I do better job of helping students articulate the learning goals in these projects and to take on more ownership and involvement in constructive, meaningful assessment of their work?

Ultimately, I think some of these challenges come back to the larger challenge of encouraging teachers and students to take an inquiry, participatory stance on learning…

Buffy raises the key issue here about digital writing that could be said for much of the history of writing instruction; this is the tension we feel between allowing students the freedom to choose topics, genres, and assessments that they find personally meaningful and will help them grow as writers in contrast and/or competition to what we feel we should or must do as teachers of writing. In the simplest terms, it boils down to whether or not we prepare students to write five paragraph essays and to be able to respond to prompts on the test, or whether we want them to be real writers. In practice, this means that we are forcing students to engage in a “writing process” and spend more time focused on using rubrics than actually talking with students about their writing. This is a classic model of teacher driven instruction where we must “motivate” students become better writers. The onus of responsibility — not to mention the topics, word limits, and structures of organization for the writing — fall squarely on the shoulders of the teacher.

What Buffy appears to be advocating for, and what I would completely concur with, is a more student-centered approach that invites students to think carefully about the process of writing, however messy that process may be. Traditionally, we’ve had about three genres in school writing: the (five paragraph) essay, the research paper, and the book report. As soon as you open up any one of those genres for multimedia expression, you immediately expose the constraints of those structures and, in turn, make it very difficult for teachers and students to apply traditional rubrics and language of assessment to the products that they create. What does a “thesis statement” look like in a slideshow or a public service announcement? Thus, Buffy hits the nail on the head when she mentions ideas about ownership, meaningful assessment, inquiry, and the participatory stance on learning. These are not just problems with writing, or with digital writing; these are problems with what my colleague Anne Whitney calls the “schooliness” of school. Writing is normally very “schooly” and, when it isn’t, it’s too “touchy/feely.” We are caught in a trap of either living up to a formulaic model or praising students for their efforts without any substantive feedback.

So, to that end, I really appreciate how Buffy raises points and asks questions that force us to think about the thinking process students are involved in during the digital writing process. More importantly, she clearly aims for students to document their own learning and to have teachers focus formative assessment on that process, ultimately leading to many of the goals that we’ve had for years when employing a writing workshop/portfolio pedagogy.  And, since she asked for some specific advice about how to move forward, I’ll offer a few points here that will also inform my thinking in the next week as I prepare to write about the digital mentor texts:

  • Use the tools at hand. Teach students to use the digital tools at hand in order to become better readers, writers, and researchers. I know that there’s still a digital divide and that not all students have access to smart phones, tablet PCs, and high-speed Internet in their own homes, yet cloud-based services such as Diigo and Evernote are allowing students to capture their own thinking as well as links to websites, audio and video just about anywhere. They need to take responsibility to do that. See a link? A video? A podcast? Save and share it. Since teachers are using the library in a variety of different ways, from a very casual to very intense and thoughtful, help students become digital learners by inviting them to use these tools and share resources on-the-go.
  • Embrace the messiness. The writing process has never been a linear one, at least not the same straight line for everyone. Despite what the posters in our classroom and the programs that people try to sell us may say, no writer worth his or her salt has ever gone straight through a process of pre-writing, drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing. I’m not even able to do it in this one blog post, let alone for an article or a book. Thus, we need to acknowledge that the writing process is recursive and messy, and that needs to happen both in our instruction and assessment. For digital writing, we can invite students to literally take snapshots or record screen casts of what they are doing, what they’re thinking, and the questions that they have while in the process of researching and writing. Have students create inquiry guides for their peers using social bookmarking, wikis, or some other collaborative tool. Invite students to pose questions to one another about their research, and part of their assessment is based on how well they respond to these questions and concerns that their peers have raised.
  • Make the process public. Whether your school is using wikis, a course management system, or some other type of social network to help students connect online, make sure that they are documenting and describing the process along the way. In addition to the suggestions above about embracing the messiness, they could have periodic checkpoints during a writing project in which they would be responsible for certain things (as, indeed, many students have always been responsible for having parts of projects done along the way). Part of what they might need to do is technical: set up accounts, watch screen cast tutorials, find _ many sources from academic databases and _ many more on the public web.  I am not saying that teachers should have every single one of these tasks are checkpoints set up before the project begins, as it could very well depend on the student, the topic, and the digital writing that he or she undertakes. Yet, holding them accountable along the way can still be done even if it is not tied to a formal quiz or essay test.
  • Make the final product public, as well as the responses. Again, this returns to this idea that students should be accountable not only for their own work, but for their thoughtful critique and commentary on the work of others.  They can use tools like Diigo to annotate webpage products, Jing to record screencasts describing a website, or Video ANT to insert commentary on a video. As they read/view the work of others and respond to that work — in conjunction with their own experience as digital writers — they can then work together to develop evaluative criteria for their projects. Some of those criteria will be shared, and will most likely be focused on the content of the projects, will some of those criteria will be specific for each particular project. For instance, everyone may have to meet the broad goal of finding at least 10 sources and accurately documenting their work, yet individual students may go about this in different ways to the use of social bookmarking, bibliographic tools, or hyperlinks, based on the digital writing that they do.

So, those are some thoughts in response to Buffy’s insightful reflections on this first half of her year integrating digital writing. Sorry that they kind of read like a list of new year’s resolutions, but I hope they are helpful.

Also, as I prepare for the collaborative series, I’m looking for examples of what I would call “professional” digital mentor texts that I can write about. The first one that came to mind for me was Dove’s “Evolution” video. While I know that students would not be expected to create something exactly like this, I do think that it opens up opportunities for many conversations about what digital writing is and could be. If you have other ideas for mentor texts that have been made by professionals yet would still be appropriate to share with students as models of exemplary digital writing, please do let you know.

Until 2012…

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Report from RCWP’s WIDE PATHS 2010

This morning, I was fortunate enough to be invited “home” to present my session, “Creating Your Digital Writing Workshop” at Red Cedar Writing Project‘s WIDE PATHS II. Beyond the wonderful feeling of being “home” with about 30 colleagues from RCWP and sharing my book with them, I continue to be inspired by the amazing work that teachers do in their classrooms and schools, despite the continued barrage of criticisms that come both directly from politicians and the media as well as indirectly from the ways that our society and government structure “educational reforms” such as Race to the Top. For more on what these “reforms” mean for organizations such as the NWP, check out Sara’s recent post on IdeaPlay.

At any rate, there were many good parts of the day, and ideas from the conversations in the opening session were captured by Dawn on the presentation page. There were a number of issues that came forward, and the conversation was rich since, as a group, we were talking as knowledgeable peers, many already engaged in digital writing practices. Most notably, we thought about a number of issues related to the actual composition of digital texts, moving beyond the logistical questions that often come up (as important as they are) and into conversations about how and why students compose digital texts. Maggie captured one idea (and I am paraphrasing) in the idea that digital media allow us to create texts that are “long enough to accomplish goal, but also short enough to keep interest.”

Then, throughout the day, there were three strands: social networking, collaborative writing, and visual studies. Overall, I feel like the day was filled with timely, relevant, and useful information, right out of the NWP tradition of “teachers teaching teachers.” We worked together, learned some new ideas, got reminded of some ideas I had forgotten (like using Diigo), and, while I couldn’t attend everything, here are some notes from the other wonderful sessions throughout the day.

Social Networking (Andrea Zellner)

  • Four components of participation in social networks
    • Digital Citizenship
    • Digital Footprint
    • Personal Learning
    • Impact on Writing
  • Thoughts from the discussion, after creating our own personal network maps on paper
    • What does it mean to “know” someone? Be connected to someone?
    • How and when do we connect to someone? To a group? Knowing that we have access to the network at our fingertips, when and how can we leverage it?
    • Thinking about how they are invited to join social networks (Pixie Hallow, Webkinz, Facebook, Second Life) and the commercial/consumer interests that some of these networks have? What about the critical literacy practices that students need to have to understand how they are positioned within and across these networks?
    • Do we create networks that are “echo chambers” where we only listen to others in our own network that do not allow or invite us to think about alternative or opposing ideas?
    • Are we co-opting the purposes of social networks? What are we trying to teach them so that they can be digital citizens? But, are we replicating traditional, teacher-centered practices that would be the same in Blackboard, or are we taking advantage of the aspects of social networks?
    • Resources:
Troy's Social Network Map
Troy's Social Network Map

Collaborative Writing (Aram Kabodian, Heather Lewis, and LaToya Faulk)

  • Heather introduced Etherpad as a tool for collaborative response to an article, then used VoiceThread as another tool for response, too. In using the two types of tools, we were thinking about the ways that text and voice comments can contribute to our own understanding of other texts, including an online article and responding to a video.
    • This got me to thinking more about VoiceThread and how to have students use that as a tool for conferring. I think that the idea of having students comment one another’s work while still “in process” is powerful. Not sure how to embed the comment at the exact moment of the video that it would be pertinent, however. A tool like Viddler‘s commenting feature would work more effectively for that, I think.
    • Lots of time for playing with the tools. Thinking about collaborating across time and space with Skype, Google Docs, VoiceThread, Diigo, and other tools. What is also interesting to me is to think more carefully about the nature of the collaboration…
      • What are the affordances and constraints of the tools?
      • What is the task that we are asking students to complete? How does that enable collaboration, or does it simply require cooperation?
      • Are you asking students to create single-authored, multi-authored, or co-authored products? How does changing the role of the writer change the technology that you are able to use?

Visual Studies (Dawn Reed with Jen Garmon and Reggie Manville)

  • Dawn – Showing a number of examples of images as a way to think about critical literacy, especially with images used in media and popular culture texts, for instance:
    • The ready.gov website and parodies of it
    • Forest Gump, and the ability to visually recreate history
    • Kent State image with fence post removed
    • Asking students to define “literacy” and how they experience misinformation and critically evaluate information and images. Thinking about “photographic truth” and the implications of how images are constructed in an age of easy photo manipulation.
  • Reggie – Thinking about how to fit visual literacy into the already crammed English curriculum with digital storytelling
    • Moving from statements of belief (ala “This I Believe”) to statements of change created as a digital movie. Combining elements of argumentative writing with visuals.
    • Then moving from this digital video project into understanding how to create a traditional text for the ACT. In this example of women’s body image, this includes ways that the student could use the same arguments and refutations used in the movie project and translating them into traditional essay structures (building context, argument, counterargument, rebuttal, etc).
    • Complexity of assessing these texts with a rubric that was already in place. Looking at three examples — one on body image, one on global warming, one on the “open beverage” rule. But, are there some qualitative differences in these works? I think so, and I am wondering how we can help students see that there are some standards of quality in the production of digital texts. One option would be to have a “viewing” day in the class, and then inviting them to revise based on what they saw in other videos as well as feedback on their own.

Final Reflections on the Day

We were going to have a large group discussion to report out on the day, but ran out of time. My final thoughts are that Andrea and the entire RCWP team organized a wonderfully thoughtful day of exploration into these three strands: social networking, collaborative writing, and visual studies. As we continue to think about the future of what it means to be a writer and a teacher of writing in a digital age, the conversations that began today can continue to guide our work into the future. I look forward to this team sharing their insights at the NWPM retreat this summer!


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Notes from “The Social Media Portfolio: Using Technology to Promote Meta-cognitive Skill Development” at NWP’s Digital Is

The Social Media Portfolio: Using Technology to Promote Meta-cognitive Skill Development

At NWP’s Digital Is

Rafi Santo, Amana Kaskazi, and Shonell Richmond

  • Global Kids
    • 20 Years in existence and focusing on significant global issues
    • Issues: Local to global and global to local understanding
    • Leadership: Skills necessary to affect change
    • Technology: How does new media contribute to our mission of global citizenship; our mission to empower youth voice aligned well with the use of technology
    • Youth: We work with youth in a variety of contexts, both locally and from a distance through technologies and in virtual worlds
    • Afterschool: Need to overcome the stereotypes of afterschool technology programs that create “super geeks”; our students are not geeks, necessarily, but there is something much broader about how to use technology in these contexts
  • Media Masters
    • Goals for addressing the challenges to media literacy
      • Giving students the means and skills to produce media who otherwise might not be able
      • Discussing ethical issues surrounding digital media production and participation
      • Promote active student reflection on skill development
    • Creating a “digital transcript“creating a portfolio with Voice Thread
      • Examining media use (music, web, etc)
      • Visualization, negotiation, and other key themes
      • Recognize the skill, utilize the skill, and enact the skill (Do it, recognize it, talk about it)
    • Discussion
      • Specific example of Harry Potter reading to discuss copyright, appropriation, and “whole life learning”
      • What can the assessment tell us — about students’ change in media literacy skills, attitudes, and abilities?
      • How can an assessment like this work in school contexts (very qualitative, not quantitative)?
      • How can we connect this to other academic skills?
      • Student preparation for portfolios — having earned the badges, it was easier to identify the project that connected to the skill, but then we had to add a reflection to it, and that was more difficult
      • Extending the assessments into different contexts; using this portfolio with meta-cognitive elements for other purposes, such as college admissions
      • Helping make explicit for young people the ways in which we are asking them to think
      • Power of ownership and the ability to hear someone’s voice, as well as the commitment behind the voice
      • How does having a framework help make the portfolio more powerful?
      • Using writing to teach critical thinking in different content areas


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Do You Use 3×5 Cards? Rethinking the Research Process

This past weekend, our department chair received an email from a local high school English teacher who asked, in short, should they be teaching students how to do a “traditional” research paper — including the use of 3×5 note cards — because some of his colleagues are strong supporters of it and others consider it “archaic.”

He wanted to hear a response from a college professor about how best to prepare students for the kinds of research that they would be doing in composition courses that they would be taking after high school. Below, I have copied and pasted the response that I offered him via email. And, now I ask you… What do you think — is it time to move away from “traditional” research paper writing processes?

—
Hello ___,

Dr. ___ forwarded your question to a number of us in the English Department who are involved in teaching composition and English Education courses, and I offer you a reply based on my own professional opinions and, to the extent that I can, what I sense are the expectations of a typical college writing classroom.

Before I answer, I want to acknowledge the many tensions that are evident in the question that you ask — between the amount of skills you aim to teach students as they do research and the time you have to do it; between the “traditional” way of teaching and newer ways that have the potential to be both positive and possibly have unintended consequences; between what your community, students, and parents might expect an English teacher to know and be able to do and what you personally and what your entire department may think might be better for students.

Moreover, I am not sure of the context in which you ask it; are you someone who thinks this process is archaic, or are you someone who finds this method valuable?

Thus, I tread carefully when I answer this, noting this complicated context. But, you asked for comments and criticisms, so I will share them. I also invite you to write back, so we can continue this conversation.

So, at risk of sounding rude, my short answer is yes, the process of using 3×5 cards is archaic.

Here is the longer answer that looks at pedagogy, genres in writing, and technologies available for digital writing.

First, pedagogy. The established practice (as I remember it from my own K-12 schooling) of choosing a research topic, gathering info on note cards, creating an outline, and then writing a final paper is, as we all know, formulaic. The writing process is never this clear and, while we do need to guide students in the process, we also need to encourage them to engage in topics in a variety of ways. Along with thinking about models such as Macrorie’s I-Search paper or Romano’s multigenre research paper, I also encourage you to have students do research like real scholars, journalists, and writers do — by talking with people and engaging in multiple forms of media, all the while documenting their research process including the questions that they have, the stumbling blocks they encounter, and the “a-ha” moments they discover. By limiting our students’ experiences simply to taking notes from existing sources, we are not really teaching them how to be active and engaged researchers and writers. We need to open up the research process to them.

Second, genres. As mentioned above with Romano’s multigenre research, the idea of having students write on a single topic through different perspectives and multiple genres is one that has taken hold in the past decade or so, and is evident in a variety of curriculum documents (such as Michigan’s HSCEs) and professional statements (such as Writing Now from NCTE). Having students produce a traditional academic research paper is still a valuable skill, and one that they will need in college. Yet, to limit their writing about that particular topic to creating only a research paper very much limits their engagement with the topic and the ways in which they represent their thinking. To that end, we need to have them write in unfamiliar genres (See Fleischer and Andrew-Vaughan) and share their writing with other audiences besides us as their teachers. We need to make their research process more purposeful by inviting them to write about it for a variety of purposes.

Third, technology. This is a personal and professional interest of mine, so I will go into a bit more detail here. I want to note the concerns that many teachers have about the uses of technology, especially the internet, including their own inexperience and the capability that it can provide for students to plagiarize. These are real concerns, and I am not trying to down play them here. Instead, what I believe is that any teacher, with good professional development and collegial support, can learn how to teach with technology and avoid many of the pitfalls that they think it will cause. In other words, just because students might be tempted to plagiarize because of the technology, we shouldn’t give up on it before we even try.

With that in mind, there are at least two technologies that I think are useful for students as they begin to document their research process and create their bibliographies, both of which are free and students can use at home, school, or other places that they can access the internet. The first is Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) and, in particular, the web-based word processor that they can use to create documents and collaborate with one another. Using this online word processor, students can begin to create an annotated bibliography — either all in one document, or with each annotation in a separate document. They can invite you, as their teacher, or other students in as collaborators on the document, thus sharing their research process with you and their peers along the way. Moreover, students can be taught how to write summaries and gather quotes in these Google Docs, and then they can use these summaries and quotes in their own writing about the research by simply copying and pasting. You can find out more about Google Docs through this PDF from Educause and video from the Common Craft show.

The second process can be accomplished in a variety of forms, but would be either to use a social bookmarking site such as delicious.com or a bibliography management tool such as Zotero, a free plug-in for the Firefox Web browser (zotero.org). Like Google Docs, you can find out more about these from Educause (Zotero and social bookmarking) and videos (Common Craft on Social Bookmarking and the video on the Zotero homepage). Both tools are useful in different ways, and students could use both. If you had to choose one only though for the process of writing the research paper, I would strongly encourage you to explore uses of Zotero. I have taught my students in both intermediate composition and a senior seminar about Zotero, and all of them have found it useful for organizing their research as they go (including tracking bibliographic info as well as keeping notes, quotes, and summaries), creating annotated bibliographies and, ultimately, helping them be more effective researchers.

With these technologies, among a number of others such as wikis and social networks, I feel that students can become more active researchers. While these tools are meant to meet the same goals as 3×5 cards — trying to help writers organize their ideas and prepare to write a research paper — as you begin to use them and teach your students to use them, I think that the ways in which these technologies can enhance the research process and contribute to students’ growth as writers quite powerful. Moreover, there is the fact that we are being asked to teach our students digital literacies such as these based on the requirements of the HSCEs and suggestions of our professional organizations.

All that said, yes, there are there still professors who teach — and demand — a traditional research paper, including 3×5 cards. Yet, it is clear that there are more shifts in our field related to our pedagogical approach, the genres we ask students to write in, and the ways in which technology is influencing that process. I hope that my response here helps encourage you and your colleagues to think about the ways that you might engage students as readers, writers, and researchers.

Finally, if you would like any help with this through professional development services, I would be happy to talk with you more about this, and what we can offer you through our site of the National Writing Project, the Chippewa River Writing Project. I know that there are teachers in the Waverly district who have attended MSU’s site, the Red Cedar Writing Project, so you also have some people “in house” who might be able to help you rethink the research paper process.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions and I look forward to hearing your response.

Troy

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Upcoming Series on Teachers Teaching Teachers

Each Wednesday for the next three weeks, I will be hosting a series of episodes that invite teachers highlighted in the book on for conversations about teaching in the digital writing workshop. Here is the announcement for this week’s webcast:

Teachers Teaching Teachers: Choice and Inquiry in the Digital Writing Workshop
September 30, 2009
This week, please join Troy Hicks, author of the new Heinemann title, The Digital Writing Workshop, and Director of the Chippewa River Writing Project at Central Michigan University, as we begin a three-part series exploring the principles and practices described in the book. For this first episode, we welcome four teachers to the conversation as they discuss how they foster student choice and inquiry in their writing classrooms:

  • Penny Kittle, Kennett High School in New Hampshire will offer perspectives on writing workshop principles and why we need to begin to focus on digital writing
  • Sara Beauchamp-Hicks, formerly of Negaunee High School in Michigan will discuss her use of wikis and Google Docs to spur student inquiry
  • Chris Sloan of Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City will share insights on how students can make choices with RSS readers and blogging
  • Shannon Powell of Central Montcalm Middle School in Michigan will discuss her experiences as a new teacher as she has begun to use digital writing in her classroom, including her recent integration of “SSR with RSS” for a class of reluctant readers

Then, on October 7th we will explore the idea of “author’s craft” as it relates to creating digital texts and, on October 14th, discuss the process of conferring and response to student writers as they create digital texts.

We would invite you to join us on Wednesday at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

Creative Commons License

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