Category: Books

Another Economist Debate: Social Networking

Crazy couple of weeks here with classes starting. So, here is a post that is not really a post from me, but from the folks at the Economist. Enjoy the next round of debates!

I saw all of your earlier posts about The Economist Debate Series and wanted to thank everyone for posting about our online events. In our first two debates, thousands of participants rallied around the topics of technology in the classroom and of national competitiveness, and our third debate looks to be just as lively. This time, The Economist debates social networking and the value it adds in the classroom. I invite you and the readers to take part by registering for free and commenting.

Since you are a preferred blogger and a member of the technology and education community we aim to serve with this debate, we wanted to give you an early look at what will happen on Tuesday when we kick off the debate.

  • This month’s debate proposition is: “The house believes that social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom.”
  • Our expert debaters are two leaders in education and technology, and will square off for three rounds of debate.
    • CON – Michael Bugeja, Director of Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Iowa State University of Science and Technology. The author of 21 books whose research is often cited by the New York Times, Dr. Bugeja was among the first to analyze the use of social networks (Facebook & Second Life) before their use by students and educators was widespread and well-understood.
    • PRO – Ewan McIntosh, National Adviser on Learning and Technology Futures for Learning and Teaching Scotland, the education agency responsible for curriculum development, and a member of the Channel 4 Media Advisory Board. He writes about social media and learning for the Guardian and the BBC, speaks internationally and consults for organizations including the British Council, the RSA, General Teaching Council of Scotland, RM and Scottish Enterprise, advising on how social media can be harnessed for to improve learning. He blogs at http://edu.blogs.com
  • Guest participants will also contribute featured comments
    • Parry Aftab, Founder & Executive Director, WiredSafety.org
    • Judith Krug, Directory, Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association (ALA)
    • Ann Flynn, Director, Education Technology, National School Board Association (NSBA)
    • Nancy Willard, Executive Director, The Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use

Follow the Debates on Facebook

The Economist has launched a Facebook group for followers of the debate. If you’re already a Facebook member, we encourage you to join our group where you’ll find syndicated content and be able to interact directly with members of The Economist community, including some of our previous guest participants.

Here’s a short debate schedule:

  • Tuesday, January 15 – Opening statements & floor opens to comments from public
  • Wednesday, January 16 – Guest Participant, Parry Aftab, WiredSafety.org
  • Thursday, January 17 – Rebuttals
  • Monday, January 21 – Guest Participant, Judith Krug, American Library Association
  • Tuesday, January 22 – Guest Participant, Ann Flynn, National School Boards Association
  • Wednesday, January 23 – Closing statements
  • Thursday, January 24 – Guest Participant, Nancy Willard, Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use
  • Friday, January 25 – Debate winner announced

Check back regularly to see the latest comments by your peers and to see if the moderator or debaters picked up your or other viewpoints from the floor. And as always, if you prefer not to be contacted again by me regarding The Economist Debate Series, please let me know. I’m more than happy to comply.

Please support discourse, and may intelligence prevail!

Shout Out to Aram Kabodian

And, finally for tonight, a quick shout out to my friend and RCWP colleague, Aram Kabodian, who is getting back into the blogging business this holiday season.

Mr. Kabodian’s Blog

Well, I took the plunge and let people know I’m playing with pageflakes and bustin’ out this blog. And people actually responded!

It was nice to hear that there’s a world of readers out there. The message board on the pageflakes site is active, I had my first comment on this blog, and the emails are rolling in too. It makes me feel like the time I spend on this tech stuff is worth it. People seem interested — though maybe it’s just the novelty of the whole thing — which makes me want to keep at it.

I’d like to think that I’m not just doing this to play and impress myself and others. I want to make it a meaningful place to think things through and improve my teaching.

Keep those cards and letters coming 🙂

You heard the man — check out his blog! He has a great sense of humor, many insights into teaching middle school kids, and some other fun things thrown in. And, while you are at it, his class’s wiki, too!

Glad to see you blogging again, Aram!

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Social Networks, School Policies, and Surveillance

My colleague Rob Rozema from GVSU has invited my students and I to participate in a new Ning social network, Teach English. I am very excited about the opportunity to be involved in this project, and we will also have students from Allen Webb‘s course at WMU join in, too.

As we consider what we will do with this network, I think that we have to ask ourselves a key question about its implementation and potential for use: how do we account for and respond to the contradiction in local, state, and federal policies regarding internet use (for instance, no blogging or social networking) and the call to teach these skills in our schools?

In other words, if we teach students how to use social networks, will they be able to use those skills once they are teaching?

Moreover, this raises another issue that my best friend Steve Tuckey and I were discussing a few weeks back — does taking a technology and reappropriating it for use in schools undermine the excitement and potential uses for that technology?

As an example, we talked about the idea of a “cheese sandwich blog,” one that tells basically accounts for the mundane happenings in everyday life. (If we build 20 million blogs, will the readers come?). Contrast that with the more substantive kinds of blogging that many edubloggers are calling for and teaching; that is, a more “academic” form of blogging. Steve asks, what’s wrong with the cheese sandwich?

He asks this not to be sarcastic (well, OK, maybe a little bit), but more to take a critical approach to how we use blogging. From an email conversation, he says, in part:

by trying to call for highfalutin standards of rigor in what our students blog about, we are essentially trying to colonize one of the most democratic spaces with the self-important hierarchy of academia. We try to set up the same old benchmarks for “good writing” in a new environment, all the while touting the greatness of its promise as something “new.” Seems schizophrenic to me. And don’t get me started on how real-time authoring serves to feed the dragon of continuous assessment…

In other words, if we reappropriate “blogging,” into an academic setting, is it blogging anymore? Or, is the definition of “blogging” (or, perhaps, edublogging), such that a higher level of discourse is now becoming expected above and beyond the typical diary/journal/update blogs of the past. And, with microblogs in Facebook and Twitter, are we going to have to think about how to make that academic blogging, too?

Steve was interested in seeing me raise this point with the other edubloggers that are thinking about similar ideas, perhaps in another forum beyond our blogs, too. Perhaps I will write a letter to EJ or something like that. If others have an idea about where and how we might discuss this issues — the appropriate use and reappropriation of blogging for academic purposes — let me know. It will certainly be on my mind as I prepare for next semester.


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Open Access to MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning

An email from Leigh alerted me to this great set of resources. Check them out:

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning – Series – The MIT Press

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning examines the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect peoples sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.

Thanks to the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation, open access electronic versions of all the books in this series are available. Follow the links from each title description below to read these editions.

For more on the MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative, visit http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org.

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Press Release: Open Yale Courses

Like MIT’s Open Course Ware, Yale is moving some of its content online and making it publicly available with a Creative Commons license. As a professor and digital writer, I applaud this move and hope that I can encourage my university, CMU, to move into that direction, too.

Below is a copy of the press release that Tom Conroy, Deputy Director of Public Affairs at Yale, sent to me and asked me to share. I appreciate him inviting me to a bloggers-only press-conference about this event, although I couldn’t make it due to family obligations. So, please contact him directly with questions.

—

CONTACT: Tom Conroy  203-432-1345

For Immediate Release: December 11, 2007

Free Yale College Courses Debut Online

      New Haven, Conn.—Today, Yale University is making some of its most popular undergraduate courses freely available to anyone in the world with access to the Internet. 

The project, called “Open Yale Courses,” presents unique access to the full content of a selection of college-level courses and makes them available in various formats, including downloadable and streaming video, audio only and searchable transcripts of each lecture. Syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets and other materials accompany the courses.

The production of the courses for the Internet was made possible by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The seven courses in the sciences, arts and humanities—which were recorded live as they were presented in the classroom to Yale students—will be augmented with approximately 30 additional Yale courses over the next several years.

“Information technology allows the knowledge and passion of leading Yale faculty to reach everyone who wishes to explore these subjects,” said Yale President Richard C. Levin. “We hope students, teachers and anyone with an interest in these topics, no matter where they live or what they do, will take full advantage of these free and easily accessed courses.”

Diana E. E. Kleiner, Dunham Professor of the History of Art and Classics and the director of the project, noted that the full content of all the courses is now readily available online and may be accessed at the users’ convenience.
“We wanted everyone to be able to see and hear each lecture as if they were sitting in the classroom,” Kleiner said. “It’s exciting to make these thought-provoking courses available so broadly for free. While education is best built upon direct interactions between teachers and students, Yale believes that leading universities have much to contribute to making educational resources accessible to a wider audience. We hope this ongoing project will benefit countless people around the world.”
Kleiner said the courses reflect the broad liberal arts education provided by Yale College, which encourages critical thinking, intellectual exploration and creativity. She said Yale plans for future Open Yale Courses to include music and the arts.

Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest said that the availability of the Yale courses has significance far beyond the university.
“Making the talents of Yale’s faculty available for free on the Internet is an important step toward the Hewlett Foundation’s goal of providing access to knowledge and educational opportunities throughout the world,” Brest said. “Truly, all the world is becoming a classroom.” 

       The URL for Open Yale Courses is:

http://open.yale.edu/courses/
The first courses available through Open Yale Courses are:

  • Astronomy 160: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, with Professor Charles Bailyn
  • English 310: Modern Poetry, with Professor Langdon Hammer
  • Philosophy 176: Death, with Professor Shelly Kagan
  • Physics 200: Fundamentals of Physics, with Professor Ramamurti Shankar
  • Political Science 114: Introduction to Political Philosophy, with Professor Steven Smith
  • Psychology 110: Introduction to Psychology, with Professor Paul Bloom
  • Religious Studies 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), with Professor Christine Hayes

To encourage the widest possible use of the courses, the license that covers most of the lectures and other course material on Open Yale Courses is Creative Commons’ Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. This license permits the free use or repurposing of the Open Yale Courses material by others. Under this license, users may download and redistribute the Open Yale Courses material, as well as remix and build upon the content to produce new lectures or other educational tools. Commercial use of the Open Yale Courses material is prohibited.
The Open Yale Courses project is produced and supported by the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation (CMI2), which promotes the innovative use of technology to enhance learning at Yale and beyond.

Open Yale Courses allows the public, in effect, to audit the Yale College courses for free online. There is no “enrollment” in the courses and Yale does not offer credit for those who use the course materials.
Yale also has developed partnerships to enable these resources to be widely utilized in academic settings around the world.

In India, Yale is working with the Indo-U.S. Inter-University Collaborative Initiative in Higher Education and Research’s Amrita satellite network to broadcast courses to universities throughout India.
In China, China Education Television (CETV) has agreed to broadcast individual lectures on CETV.  CETV broadcasts are viewed by millions of Chinese. 
Individual faculty members at universities around the world will use Open Yale Courses in their classrooms.  Faculty at the following universities are participating:  University of Bahrain, Instituto de Tecnologia de Buenos Aires — ITBA (Argentina), Fudan University (China), University of Ghana, Jimma University (Ethiopia), Tec de Monterrey (Mexico), University of Mumbai (India), Peking University (China), University of Tokyo (Japan) and Waseda University (Japan).

“We applaud Yale for making available their most valuable resource, the knowledge of their faculty, to contribute to improve the quality of the teaching in the world. We look forward to benefiting from and contributing to this effort,” said Patricio Lopez, president of the Virtual University, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico.

Yale Vice President Linda K. Lorimer, who is responsible for the University’s Office of Digital Content, commented, “Open Yale Courses gives us a new opportunity to share our intellectual treasury with everyone and for free.  We welcome other universities, high schools and non-governmental organizations to use these and future courses we will post on the Internet.”
Open Yale Courses will be featured in the more than three hundred American Corners located in libraries and universities abroad. American Corners is a public diplomacy project of the U.S. Department of State, and each day thousands of young people come to American Corners to pick up a book about life in the United States, learn about U.S. colleges and universities, or watch a video about the United States.  American Corners partnerships are often located outside of the capital city or in remote areas of the country.  With Open Yale Courses available at American Corners, students and lifelong learners will be able virtually to audit a class taught by one of the top professors in the world.
Open Yale Courses also will offer secondary school students who are considering applying to study in the United States the opportunity to see how subjects are taught in an American university.  Toward this end, educational advisers throughout the Middle East will be trained in their advising workshop next spring on how to use open educational resources, including Open Yale Courses, to prepare students for academia in the United States.
In addition to Open Yale Courses, Yale provides a growing library of free video and audio offerings on the Internet featuring Yale faculty and distinguished visitors to campus. This free resource includes a large variety of public talks, interviews and musical performances.

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Notes from “Educational Blogging: What, Where, Why and How”

Today, I had the chance to attend an educational technology session at MSU featuring Nicole Ellison, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies & Media, MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences, and Leigh Graves Wolf, Learning Technology and Culture Programs, MSU College of Education. Their topic is “Educational Blogging: What, Where, Why and How.” Here are some notes from the session:

  • What is educational blogging?
    • Blogging in educational settings: in the classroom, between department members, intra- and inter-university research collaboration
    • We will focus on cases where students maintain blogs as part of their coursework
    • Pew research: 8% of internet users maintain a blog, 39% of internet users read blogs, 57% of bloggers are younger
  • Why blogs and education?
    • Not much work that makes causal claims about how blogs impact education, but that is difficult
    • Focus on critical skill of writing
    • Encourages students to engage with positions divergent from their own
    • Students are invests because their is a larger audience
    • Increases digital literacy
    • Supports peer-to-peer learning and student-to-instructor knowledge sharing
    • Learning becomes less bound by time and space
  • Where to blog?
    • ANGEL — they are protected, but no RSS
    • On your own server — college is in control of the content and can protect it with complete administrative control
    • Edublogs, Blogger, WordPress — differing levels of administrative rights
    • MicroBlogs: Twitter and Facebook
  • What: An educational blogging case study
    • What are the differences among students’ perceptions regarding the educational beenfit of writing a blog entry vs. reading other students’ blogs vs. reading other students’ comments?
    • What are student perceptions of the experience of blogging as an educational activity?
    • Overall perceptions:
      • A new experience and uniquely engaging in ways that traditional papers are not
      • Encouraged a less formal writing voice. potentially eliciting a more authentic writing style
      • Exposed students to different perspective; surprised by range of responses
      • They felt it was most useful to read other people’s blogs
      • “I liked the fact that we had to comment on others blogs. It’s cool to get some feedback on what I’ve written.”
      • ” I felt it was really cool when one of the people actually cited what I said in my blog on someone else’s blog.”
      • “It taught be some things that I didn’t pay much attention to before. It was cool because i was able to see what students thought about things we typically wouldn’t talk about in class.”
      • “[comments] are nice to see when the person really puts thought into them, and sometimes make me think and want to write more.”
      • I think it is more effective using the WWW because anyone can view it and we saw that when Ryan’s blog was commented on by the actual author of the piece that we read.”
  • What: Commenting
    • Not all students saw benefits of reading others’ blogs or comments
    • Uncomfortable giving critical feedback: “Some people didn’t even write what they were supposed to. Plus, I don’t really know how to respond to other people’s ideas, I don’t want to tell them that they are wrong or anything like that.”
    • Technical problems
    • I didn’t give them lots of guidance on how to provide comments, so I would do that differently
  • What: Implications for Practice
    • Students are going to come in with a notion of what blogging is, and students may need guidance on how to reconcile their notions of blogging with the classroom context
    • In some cases, encourage use of pseudonym since this content (if public) will be archived for years to come
    • Consider technical implementation
    • Students need guidance on providing constructive criticism
  • What: Enthusiastic, yet wary and ambivalent
    • Enjoyed reading others’ blogs
    • Expands thinking
    • Didn’t want to sound preachy and start arguments
  • How to blog
    • Different Use Models
      • One to many: From the teacher as a posting to students; from the student to others
        • Provide feedback to a presenter on his/her blog
      • Many to many (class blogs)
        • People can become experts in one area
      • Many to one (RSS aggregation)
        • Use Google Reader to read all of my students’ blogs
      • Experimental Writing
        • Creating an “academic” writing in blogging environment — posts within the blog are tagged and connected as well as external links (Leigh’s example)
      • Issues
        • Anonymous blogging
        • FERPA concerns
        • Intellectual property
      • Other tools
    • How: Assessment
      • Grade for content or completion?
      • Require a set number of posts?
      • Specify timing of posts throughout semester?
      • Require comments and feedback?
      • Need to back up posts
    • How: Practical Advice
      • Blog yourelf
      • Start small
      • Subscribe to RSS feeds
      • Read other educator blogs
      • Virtual University
      • Blogs for Learning

Reflections on Social Networking based on NCTE/NWP 2007

Today’s NCTE Inbox had an official list of blog posts about the convention, as well as Traci Gardner’s commentary about whether and how teachers should blog (for the record, she thinks that they should, although some districts do not). I find this thread of conversation an interesting complement to a few others floating around today, too.

One of the threads is a group of NWP tech liaisons talking about whether and how we should start a national social network of teachers doing great things with writing and technology. This network exists, in some ways, but it is scattered in many places, not all of them “officially” sanctioned by NWP (nor do they need to be). This conversation is important though because I think that it raises one fundamental issue — for all the blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarks, RSS feeds, Facebook groups, Ning networks, and other ways that we have to stay in touch, do we actually stay in touch?

I have been thinking a lot about this lately as I help my pre-service teachers understand the implications of blogs and wikis as well as try to organize such groups for the various professional organizations that I am in including RCWP, MCTE, MRA, and CEE. How to build and maintain a network — let alone if a “formal” network is needed at all — is at the core of what I and four other colleagues are thinking about as we prepare to propose a new interactive website for CEE. There is also interaction in the works for MRA. Yet, RCWP and MCTE have had interactive sites, more or less, for a year or two now and neither of them generate much traffic. So, even if you build the space for the network, it is not a guarantee that teachers will come.

So, what to do about social networks for teachers? I am not sure how to best answer that. We are trying a wiki and Google groups for Project WRITE, and having limited interactions and success with those spaces. Is part of the problem that the idea of social networking is still too new or different from what we are used to with F2F networking? Are we still just stuck in email mode and not ready to venture out to the web to find a network, rather waiting for it to come to our inbox? Or, is it just the fact that a certain type of chemistry, one that can’t be forced, but must be natural, must emerge?

I certainly don’t have any answers, especially not tonight. But, I feel that the questions are worth asking; even if we don’t get to answering them outright, we can begin to understand why teachers (generally) choose not to use these networks. My thoughts range from being busy to not being aware, from being happy within a school-based learning community to simply not wanting to move outside of one’s comfort zones. As networks continue to grow, I think that we need to ask these fundamental questions about why and how they work for some teachers, while not for others, and whether we should be trying to make the perfect network, or rethink what it means to be a teacher in the 21st century.

RCWP Wiki Featured in Wikispaces Blog

Have I mentioned before that I love Wikispaces? If not, you are hearing it now:

Wikispaces Blog » Blog Archive » Who Are You and What Are You Doing?

Who Are You and What Are You Doing? October 2nd, 2007 by sarah

In our recent mailing, we asked to hear from you – how you ended up using Wikispaces, and what motivated you to stick around and keep using it. And hear we did. In several future blog posts, we will be highlighting some of the responses we received, showing you the diverse ways that you are using Wikispaces.

Troy Hicks, a professor at Central Michigan University, is using wikis to plan and teach his courses. He has been involved with wikis for over a year. Before joining CMU’s faculty, he and other teachers at the Red Cedar Writing Project at Michigan State University began their own project, a wiki “by writing teachers, for writing teachers.” A year later, their space is going strong. They have used it as a place to post workshop outlines, share notes from conferences, link to blogs they are following, and start book lists. It has become one of the primary spaces in which these teachers collaborate to plan workshops and events for the Red Cedar Writing Project.

Of his experience with Wikispaces, Troy says, “Wikispaces is a part of my everyday life as a teacher and teacher educator, and I thank you for the outstanding service that you have created.”

Check it out as a resource for writing or for getting ideas on how to expand your own collaboration.

Thanks to the entire Wikispaces Team for their support of free wikis for K-12 teachers and students.

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The Economist Debate Series

Along with the K12Online Conference, here is another unique opportunity for online participation in the month of October. It was sent to me by Jeff from Sparkpr on behalf of The Economist.  Get in there and vote, the check out the debate!

Hi Troy – Jeff here from Sparkpr for The Economist.

I saw your blog, Digital Writing Digital Teaching, and am delighted to invite you and your readers to be part of an extraordinary first for Economist.com. The Economist Debate Series officially kicks off October 15th and voting is underway now to determine the propositions that will be debated. The first subject being debated is education and we’d love to have you participate in the debate and link to the lively conversation.

The Economist Debate Series is an ongoing community forum where propositions about topical issues will be rigorously debated in the Oxford style by compelling Speakers. The Economist is inviting you and your readers to take part by voting on propositions, sharing views and opinions, and challenging the Speakers.

Five propositions have now been short-listed to address the most far-reaching and divisive aspects of the education debate covering: the place of foreign students in higher education; the position of corporate donors; and the role of technology in today’s classrooms. The highest ranking propositions will be debated, with the first launching on Oct 15th.

Cast your vote now at: http://www.economist.com/debate/?sa_campaign=debateseries/debate1/blog/DigitalWritingDigitalTeaching

Choose the most resonant propositions to be debated from the list below:

Education – The propositions:

1. This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

2. This house proposes that governments and universities everywhere should be competing to attract and educate all suitably-qualified students regardless of nationality and residence.

3. This house believes that companies donate to education mainly to win public goodwill and there is nothing wrong with this.

4. This house believes that the “digital divide” is a secondary problem in the educational needs of developing countries.

5. This house believes that social networking technologies will bring large changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom

Join the Debate

The debate schedule is as follows:

  • Sep 17th-Oct 12th – Vote for your favorite proposition and join the open forum to discuss topics
  • Oct 15th – Winning proposition is revealed and the Debate begins
  • Oct 18th – Rebuttals. Share your comments on issues so far and vote for your winning side
  • Oct 23th – Closing arguments by the Speakers. Post any additional comments you would like to share and vote for your winner
  • Oct 26th – The debate winner is announced.

To receive debate updates sign up at http://www.economist.com/debate/?sa_campaign=debateseries/debate1/blog/DigitalWritingDigitalTeaching. We will then contact you to announce the winning proposition and details of the debate as it unfolds.

I look forward to you joining us and fellow Economist readers for this lively debate. In the meantime, check the site to track which proposition is winning, and to view guest participants and the announcement of key Speakers at http://www.economist.com/debate/?sa_campaign=debateseries/debate1/blog/DigitalWritingDigitalTeaching.

IMing Back in the News

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.

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