At the WIDE-EMU Un-Conference, Andrea Zellner introduced us to Hackasuarus and the idea that we can remix websites as a form of digital writing and expression. So, given the very limited time that we had, I wanted to try to make something that was a political commentary. This was an interesting digital writing process, as I had to quickly learn how to use the Hackasaurus “X-Ray Goggles” then identify a website that I wanted to critique, find alternative images to place in that website (alternate logo and alternate ad) and use a photo editing service to hack together two sections of the image (to remove a banner ad) before posting to Flickr.
That’s a heck of a lot to do in just 15 minutes, and it raises questions about what we are able (and should do) with students in our writing classrooms, but here is my final image:
Quite a neat idea, and one that I need to consider as I think about teaching ENG 201 next semester…
So, now that it is Monday of my biggest and busiest professional week of the year, I need to hit full stride.
NCTE and NWP 2010. Hooray!
Image courtesy of NWP
Although I tell myself each year that I’ll cut back, do a little bit less, and just enjoyed my time at the convention, it seems a year after year I find more and more things to do. This year is no exception, and in reality I’m thankful for the many opportunities that these two organizations continue to offer me each fall as I network with my colleagues, present new ideas, and grow as a professional. In some ways it’s fitting that this happens right before Thanksgiving, because it does make me thankful for all the people with whom I am going to interact with in the next few days (although I will say that I’m usually exhausted by the end of it all!). So, as I am preparing for multiple sessions, I want to share some of my thinking, as well as the details on when and where I’ll be, during these busy days coming up.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Upon arriving in Orlando on Wednesday night, there really won’t be any time from the moment we get on board the Disney Express until we crash at our hotel. That means a bright start on Thursday morning as Sara and I make our way from the Yacht and Beach Club over to the Contemporary Resort for the NWP annual meeting. Right away, at 9:30 AM, I’m presenting with one of our CRWP co-directors Kathy Kurtze and two other NWP colleagues in a session called “Reading in the Summer Institute.” Goals for the session include inviting people into our thinking process about how, when, and why we choose particular texts, inviting participants to share their own texts that they use in the Summer Institute, and thinking more broadly about how we can respond to texts through a variety of professional types of writing and with various technologies. As with every NWP session that I have been a part of over the past seven years, this one provides new opportunities to think about what it means to teach teachers, and I’m excited to work with Rick, Ann, and Kathy to lead this session. In particular, I am really interested in hearing how other sites are engaging teachers and reading responses through the use of technologies such as digital stories, podcasts, discussion forums, and other types of read/write Web. After the session, we will ask people to contribute to a collaborative Google Doc where they can share their reading lists with one another. I look forward to seeing what will be happening with NWP’s new social network as well as the Digital Is collection of web-based resources.
After my morning session with NWP, I will have a little bit of time to hang out and talk with some other colleagues there. Before too long though, I’ll have to make my way back over to the Coronado, as Sara Kajder, Bud Hunt, and I are on tap to repeat our session from last year’s annual convention, Three Reports from Cyberspace. During the session last year, Sara was, unfortunately unable to join us. That said, her spirit still infused the interactive, multi-layered discussion while Bud and I led the room of about 200 teachers, as well as some online colleagues who couldn’t be at the convention. When are asked to present the session again, we jumped at the chance, and we think that there will be a whole new series of opportunities to open up conversations about how on why to use technology in our classrooms. In particular, Bud is going to talk about infrastructure, Sara is going to talk about assessment, and I’m going to talk about pedagogy. At that point, we’ll open up the floor as we did last year questions, comments, links, and insights from the audience. What we hope to do this year, even more so than what we did last, will be to continue the dialogue. We all began by collaboratively composing a welcome letter in a Google document, which we then each posted to our blog, the presentation wiki page, and the NCTE connected community. While many conference presentations comes and go, we hope to inspire an actual dialogue where our colleagues able to share their reports from cyberspace, and we might find stories, examples, and other types of data that will support the argument that digital learning matters.
Once we finish with the cyberspace reports, we will immediately run down the hall in the Coronado and present at NCTE’s middle level get-together. Sara will lead the way on this session, followed with lots of tech support and ideas from Bud and me. This is a wonderful honor for me, since being asked to be a featured speaker at NCTE is something that, quite honestly, I never really imagined. I remember attending my first and NCTE conference in Detroit in 1997, and I saw many of the people that I’ve been reading in my undergraduate methods courses, hearing about from other colleagues, and wondering if they were, in fact, real people. As an undergraduate, this experience opened my eyes, and now I know that those who are featured speakers at the NCTE annual convention really set the tone, pace, the conversations for our entire organization. So, working together to deliver the cyberspace reports and then moving to the middle level get-together is a wonderful opportunity for Sara, Bud, and I to set our own ideas in NCTE’s broader conversations related to literacy. One of the things that we want to make clear is that we are not using technology for technology’s sake, and that we want NCTE to continue taking a leadership role in promoting digital literacies in curriculum and instruction practices, as well as in decision-making about school infrastructure and assessment.
That rounds out a busy Thursday or sessions, followed that evening by a gathering of my CRWP colleagues to celebrate the second year of our writing project’s work and the fact that we are bringing ten site leaders to this year’s annual meeting. I look forward to hearing from them about their experiences at the annual meeting, many of them attending for the first time.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Friday morning brings us to my favorite part of the NWP annual meeting, the General Session, where the Executive Director speaks, as well as the keynote speaker, other site directors, NWP teacher consultants, and various guests. It is, by far, one of the most exciting moments of the entire trip every year. We are bringing 10 CRWP teacher consultants with us this year, and I look forward to being at the session with them. Energy, excitement, enthusiasm that this two hour meeting generates propels the writing project forward through the doldrums of winter and into our planning for spring and summer months. So, needless to say, it’s something that I want to attend. Also because the rest of my time on Friday will find me at NCTE, it might be one of the few opportunities I have really connect with NWP colleagues, unless I can make it back for a tweet up later on.
Also on Friday, NCTE will be premiering its 100th anniversary film “Reading the Past, Writing the Future.” Two years ago was fortunate enough to be invited by John Golden to be interviewed for this film while in San Antonio. At the time, I was still working on my book, and didn’t really know what would be happening with my career in digital writing. Two books, a new writing project, three NCTE webinars, and too many PD sessions to count later, I’m kind of curious to see what I sounded like two years ago, and whether or not the things I said I’ll been reported in San Antonio still ring true. I’m told that they do, from those who have reviewed of the film, and I’m still honored to be a part of the many among many distinguished voices that will be heard in celebration of NCTE’s past, present, and future. One of the things that I enjoy most about NCTE is the fact that, as colleagues, I do feel comfortable roaming the hallways of the convention center, easily talking with my mentors and peers as well as those who are just now entering the profession. This dialogue that happens across generations of teachers happens in few other places, and I really enjoy the opportunity to be a part of it, and I hope that this film contributes to NCTE’s rich history and exciting future.
First, Tech to Go. Sara Kajder has, over the past three years, invited a number of teachers to participate in NCTE’s just-in-time, nearly one-to-one personal development experience teaching English for technology: “Tech to Go.” While topics vary from video production, blogging, collaborative wordprocessing, using apps for the iPhone, the Tech to Go sessions have become a destination for many the past few years. In the three sessions that I have led, I’ve enjoyed the intimate conversations with colleagues, all who are able to ask genuine questions about why and how they might use particular technologies in their teaching. Moreover, I appreciate the opportunity to be standing there with the computer and be able to put their hands on the mouse and keyboard, rather than standing on the front of the giant lecture hall, unable to have an interaction, perhaps teaching them just one small thing that they can take back to their classrooms. While we know that seeing these tools in action in front of a large audience is sometimes inspiring, I also know that many teachers benefit from the one-to-one support types of sessions offered. So I’m looking forward to being a part of to go again this year.
The other component of that day is the Google Monster presentation. Last year, Jeff Golub invited Sara, Bud, and I to do the reports fromcyberspace session. Attendees in that session included Bill Bass, Tara Seale, Andrea Zellner, and Sara Beauchamp-Hicks. We wondered if there was a way to do something with all of these teachers were already trained as Google certified teachers similar to the reports from cyberspace session. I suggested that we extend his reports from cyberspace model to a Google monster session, and they snapped up the opportunity and submited a proposal. So, here we are with kind of a cyberspace reports, part two, but Google style. Although my role in this session is technically listed as responder, I’m actually going to act as more of a moderator of as Bill, Andrea, Sara, and Tara offer their insights about how they use Google tools to solve their daily tasks and problems as educators. Like the cyberspace report session, this should be interactive and invite comments questions and interaction from the audience. It will be lightning fast, so there’ll be resources posted online for later. All in all, very excited about the opportunity to watch Sara present to a large audience, see her enthusiasm for teacher education and technology shine through along with Bill, Andrea, and Tara.
Saturday afternoon and Sunday bring a little bit of a break this year, at least in the sense that while we are wishing many of our colleagues safe travel home, we will have a little bit of downtime where we are actually able to attend some sessions and connect with other colleagues. Again, this is one of the most exciting parts about being at the convention. These sessions are always useful, as the one session that I went to last year on fair use has completely changed my thinking on why and how to invite students to use copyrighted materials and creating digital media. It’s amazing to think that one hour-long session really fundamentally change the way I go about teaching and writing. But this session has, and I’m thankful for opportunities such as this during the annual convention. What I normally say to myself when I jump on the plane is that if I can come back with one good, solid, thoughtful idea that I can integrate into my own teaching and writing, then I’ll be all that much better for. A usually come back with much more, but it’s my goal to seek out that one nugget, that one session that I know will provide me with some answers and movie forward to next year. I look forward to finding that session sometime on Saturday or Sunday.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Just as many people are heading home from the convention, I’m still warming up. On Monday I’ll actually be a part of two different workshops. First, I will be a part of the ACE workshop, hosted by Ewa McGrail, and presenting on the topic of using Zotero and and RSS for researching. I really do want to hone this presentation, and think more carefully about how I can talk to teachers in a future book, article, and/or presentation about fundamentally rethinking what it means to teach argumentative and informational writing at the secondary level. This stems in part from a blog post I wrote last year about rethinking the research process. Given the requirements of the common core standards, not to mention standardized assessments by which we are measured, and our students are measured, I really do want teachers to think more critically and carefully about how digital writing tools such as a bibliography manager, an RSS reader, social bookmarking, and any number of other interactive, web-based digital writing tools may help students become more active, engaged, and the research process. Also, given the many commercially licensed products that are out there nowadays, I want teachers to see that they really can organize their research process with free web-based and open source tools. So, I look forward to constructing a hour-long workshop and getting feedback from peers.
Later in the morning, I leave ACE and head over to the CEE colloquium: “Multicultural, Multiliterate: Writing the World.” Kristen Turner and Jonathan Bush invited me to be a featured speaker during this year’s session, sponsored by the commission on writing teacher education. They wanted to focus on the multigenre approaches as well as multimodal technologies. Featuring, Tom Romano and Christina Ortmeier-Hooper in the morning, I’m fortunate enough to be speaking about multimodal composition in the late morning. One of the unique challenges of presenting at the NCTE annual convention this year will be the fact that there is limited or no wifi connectivity, and this day is no exception. For many years now, there are a number of us who have lamented the fact that these conventions do not have free, open, and adequate wifi access. If we really wanted to our colleagues to move forward with digital writing, this is an absolute essential. At any rate, that means that my session will focus on mobile learning, and that is a cool new area for me to explore and present on.
That said, the goal for the afternoon will be to move to EPCOT center to both capture and critique the ways in which we see cultures presented there. So, a large degree what we’ll be doing later in the day will involve mobile devices, so that’s where I’m focusing my attention during my presentation. I want to get people thinking about how and why they might choose audio recordings, video recordings, snapshots, twitter messages, and other forms of digital writing that can happen on their mobile devices and across networked spaces in order to both capture their reflections in the moment and prepare to make a digital composition later on. I will probably invite them to use Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Cinch. Other tools are, of course, welcome! One of the goals that they have for the moment in terms of simply capturing digital assets is that they can go back to their computer later create into a digital story, wiki, or other type of digital writing media. We want people to be comfortable using their mobile devices to stay connected both with their small groups, across the entire CEE group, and in preparation for preparing pieces of multi-genre pieces of digital writing. We are following up this colloquium with the webinar December, the time and date still yet to be set, as an opportunity to read/view/listen to one another’s texts and respond to them.
Since we will be in EPCOT Center Monday afternoon, my hope is that Sara and I will be able to enjoy one last dinner alone, or perhaps with a small group of colleagues, before we hit the road on Tuesday. She will be heading back to the UP while I stay in Florida to visit with my dad. This is one of the bittersweet parts about NCTE; once you convene with all your friends and colleagues for many days, everyone heads home for Thanksgiving, exhausted, yet refreshed at the same time. I get tired just looking at my schedule is coming week, yet at the same time I am genuinely excited about the opportunities that continue to be presented to me. My hope is that my message across all the sessions remains consistent: if we engage students as writers, and we offer writing tasks and technologies that are both timely and useful, we as teachers will be able to open up our pedagogy, expect more from them as writers, and begin to see their worlds and different ways.
I look forward to continuing conversations with many of you face-to-face next week in Orlando.
How to do this in the classroom? Invite your students to create character profiles on Twitter, invite them to create new texts from the characters’ perspective
Begin by learning about these ideas for self-education, then moving into classroom and after school programs
Be conservative in content, but radical in approach
What’s essential, what can be transferred into a new medium?
Doug Hartman, from MSU’s Literacy Achievement Resource Center, spoke at MRA 2010 on “The Future of Reading and Writing at the Present Time: Preparing Students and Teachers for the 21st Century.”
6000 year history of literacy in just a few minutes (note: technologies don’t just go away… some features may return over time; e.g. “scrolling” and “tablets”)
finger writing in the earth
sticks and brushes
hieroglyphics
clay tablet
scroll (moving from clay to scroll was a dazzling shift at that time — length and durability)
Linguistic texts to semiotic texts (images, audio, etc)
The balance is tipping towards semiotic texts
Semiotic texts are increasingly digital
Digital texts are ever more online
Reading and viewing across these texts
Questions to pose:
Do our curriculum, standards, and assessments include the range of technologies that our students use?
Shift 2: The strategies that students use to read and write these texts are changing
Looking for information to supplement what they are able to find in textbooks and is able to find so much more
Reading the book, looks up words he doesn’t know, and may use a secondary source
Reading online requires different strategies — moving from one web page to another, back to the original, and one way leading on to another; the potential for his comprehension to be expanded is enormous
This second type of comprehension places a higher demand on people’s cognitive abilities than typical book reading
Types of knowledge for reading: declarative, procedural, and conditional; once online, also adding identity, locational, and goal knowledge. Read more on his Slideshare document. (NOTE: He said that the slides from this presentation will be posted there later today.)
Do our curriculum, standards, and assessments include the range of strategies that our students use?
Shift 3 and 4 — ran out of time in the session, but “moment to moment instruction” and “professional development” are the third and fourth shifts
Earlier this month, I blogged about some sessions from the Wisconsin State Reading Association on the NWP Walkabout Posterous site and I am (finally) cross-posting them here with links to the original posts… sorry for the delay!
I really enjoy it when new technologies challenge me.
Honest…
Figuring out how to embed a Cinch into a Posterous, as strange as that all sounds, has been a challenge. I thought that Posterous only allowed posting from email, as that is how the technology had been introduced to me. That was my mindset, and I was struggling because I asked Paul how to post a Cinch and he said it couldn’t be done via email. I scratched my head as I worked from my iPhone, moving between Cinch, looking at Posterous on Safari, and reading Paul’s tweets… why not?
So, Gmail wouldn’t let me do it and, until I finally logged into Posterous, I couldn’t figure out how my NWP colleagues had done it. I didn’t see a “Publish to Posterous” button on Cinch, nor did I realize I could compose a “traditional” blog post through Posterous until I did some searching around today after Paul told me it could be done. Couldn’t figure out how at first, but I finally figured it out. It all goes to show that even the techies amongst us have our conceptions of how new literacies work challenged from time to time.
At any rate…
On to the real reason I am writing this post today — the Cinch recordings of Julie Coiro and Sara Kajder speaking directly to an NWP audience about their latest thinking related to reading and writing in digital environments, straight from interviews that I snagged with each right after their presentations at the Wisconsin State Reading Association Conference last week. Thanks to both of them for sharing their time and expertise.
1. Instructional challenge – find readers. Engage reluctant readers to create a book trailer via digital movie making in three class periods.
– examining movie trailers and dissecting them
– discussing how to craft a trailer for the book
– creating the book trailer in movie making program (or via the sims and using Jing to create a video)
– “Dr. Kajder, I don’t like to read and write, but I like to make movies… You tricked me!”
2. Instructional challenge – summarizing. Creating podcasts. What do you have to say about this book? It is a synthesis -you need to teach something to the other kids in the room. Then, the entire school votes to decide which podcasts go up on the school website.
– example of fifth graders podcasting about the six traits of writing
– in inviting other people into classroom literature circles via skype
– podcast with an expert (submarines in the American Revolution with Harvard Professor); listened to interviews on NPR as examples
– want to make kids “googleable” for the good, smart work that kids do (ala Bud Hunt), depends on where we save things and how they are archived
– creating visual “mentor text” via iMovie. Choose just a small portion of the text. Recite from the text (checking for understanding) and also thinking aloud with text-go-world connections. It is an assessment, but this is the least “assessy” assessment they have ever done.
– using delicious and diigo with kids to create their reader’s identity. This gives digital readers a way to hold on to texts and show what is important to them.
Many resources and ideas. We need to appreciate the ways in which kids work and play. How do we figure out a way to build curious readers?
Listening to Julie Coiro talk about “How Does Reading and Learning Change on the Internet? Responding to New Literacies” at WSRA 2010
Examing students’ reality of multiple and overlapping literacies – how can we capture some of that same excitement in schools?
She just cited Tom Freidman’s “The World Is Flat” as the source for the phrase “racing to the top.” I didn’t realize that, but sitting here next to Sara Kajder and we both agree that this makes the clear economic focus of RTTT
Online readers and offline readers are successful in different ways. What’s the difference?
1. Identifying important questions – yes, we have a curriculum to follow, but students can ask questions that they are curious about that will likely meet the objectives, too. For instance, why do cats cough up hairballs? As this moves into MS and HS, the questions become deeper and more substantial.
2. Locating information – for instance, finding a website bit then searching within it (can’t rely on a site’s navigation bar alone any more, espe ially with graphical interface). Teach kids to be flexible to take what they know about layout and design to seek out new info. Using kid’s search sites vs regular search engine. What about limited engines or visual searches like Kartoo? Tag clouds?
3. Evaluating Search Results – how many sites found? Who sponsors the sites? What sites may not be available in a few months? How can you tell, in the results, what search terms are used? What disadvantages would visiting the sites have?
— play a game with kids to make the number of search results go down (refining the search) of making it go up. Looking at the number to make it go up or down is a process of adding and subtracting words to refine.
— Teaching about context clues to help students to read URLs — why is it important to know who sponsors the site before you even view it? Do you make predictions when you read inthe Internet? We do so all the time with stories, sometimes in content area texts, and rarely online? Put a label on it — call it predicting, and help them know what they are doing? This can “take all the fun out of searching,” but if helps students pause to think. Need prior knowledge about URLs and how sites are housed. — prior knowledge if the topic used to be critical to comprehending texts, but know google can give you prior knowledge in a snap and bring you to that level.
4. Where do I read first? — am I on the homepage? Like a book walk, help students take the “brain steps” to preview a website. Who is the author?
Great ideas, had planned for two hours, but had to end!
The guidelines that have been created since the implementation of the 1970s copyright law were brought about from negotiations by the media industry; the guidelines that were created are not set down as the law
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.
Notes from Margaret Hedstrom’s “The Future of Networked Knowledge”
Overview Announcement:
Dr. Hedstrom is an archivist who is on the faculty of the School of Information at U of M. Her research interest is digital information. She has done some interesting cross cultural empirical research on user response to various methods of archiving digital files. (e.g. “The Old Version Flickers More:” Digital Preservation from the User Perspective. American Archivist http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/dig-pres_users-perspective.pdf) Not just ease of use but also reliability of stored electronic files.
She is also a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. (Their report available at http://er.lib.msu.edu/item.cfm?item=050123)
Notes from the session:
Intro
Recent feature story from NYT on archiving digital materials
We are trying to build networks, facilities, and human capital that takes advantage of the burgeoning world of digital information
There are archival questions in every discipline, problems that we encounter in humanities and social sciences, as well as other sciences
Today’s talk will be to reflect back on the ACLS Commission’s thoughts on infrastructure for education and the humanities
What is the vision and potential of this, as well as the challenges that we experience on a daily basis and others that we can anticipate; then discuss some paths that we can use to move towards this vision
The Vision
The potential for cyber infrastructure allows for transformative research that were not possible for people to address in the past as well as open scholarship
This is the big goal for research cyber infrastrucure
Looking from the humanities and social science perspective at a report from science and engineering report on cyber infrastructure
What could we do if we had massive amounts of digital data, easy-to-use analytical tools, and networks of repositories, and well-trained people to use it?
There must be money out there for the scientists, and the humanists could ride on their coat tails, right? Well… it turns out that when you talk to scientists there are problems with funding for research, and competition is intense, too.
Many of us from outside of these science communities think that they are networked and forward-thinking, but there are many questions about what makes legitimate science, peer review, qualifications of researchers, etc.
More thoughts on the vision
What do we mean by infrastructure?
It is about the protocols for moving data, for sure
But, it is also about the people who know how to approach these new resources
Archivists who are getting data into shape so others can use it
There is a lot of technical work in adding metadata that goes unnoticed and, consequently, is different from what has been done in the physical world
To take advantage of this potential, we need to learn how to teach and research in different ways, and these are the bigger stumbling blocks that we need to get over
There are new ways of addressing research that are happening in a parallel with a move towards interdisciplinarity
How do you take ideas that have been historically separated by institutional boundaries that are now coming back together again in a digital convergence?
How does an interest in cyber-enabled learning happen in conjunction with this? Is there a dissastisfaction with the compartmentalized visions of scholarship?
A goal for cyber infrastructure shifts your way of thinking about research and looking at problems that allows for a new way to think about problems.
What would “big” humanities (transformative research) mean?
Because of the way that humanities research has been done in the past (single investigator, deep problem, specific set of data resources) — the problems have been scaled down to fit within the scope of work for one human being.
Now, we can scale the work across a team of people and apply knowledge to much bigger questions
Changing the culture is partly a generational change and partly thinking about not trying to convince those who do not want to change their ideas.
Some of the big issues with the humanities is that the early attempts to do quantitative research didn’t fit in with the paradigm of what people were trying to look at.
What has happened since then is that the kind of resources available to, say, historians, are richer and more vast.
You can get census data, yes, but you can also get images, primary texts, and other items more easily
UM and Google’s library project — how does a historian go about mining that data?
Resistance
You can enable other kinds of cyber science, but don’t take away from my current budget.
Is the work empirical? Does it have rigorous tests of validity? What happens when you triangulate it with other kinds of research?
Openness in Scholarship
Open in both the sense that it is making contributions to research as well as have access to the results
The raw materials for the research (documents, data, and even people) are networked and widely accessible
In this area, she gives librarians lots of credit for moving forward in this area
There are formidable monetary and intellectual property issues to overcome here, though
Research becomes much more collaborative
It doesn’t mean that the idea of the lone investigator goes out the window
Expertise is shared, however, and scholarship is open to new audiences and perspectives
Universities have done a disservice by trying to have “quality” through exclusivity
What is the line between a free-for-all and a very rich dialogue about the research questions we are trying to pursue?
Also, could we engage younger people with a degree of fun? Have we dismissed something that people might find engaging by dismissing it as frivolous?
Challenges
Where do you start with all of this?
There is a complex set of interdependent variables here.
How do we do research without a critical mass of resources and tools?
There have been some areas in the humanities where things have changed.
For instance, in the classics, you find many early adopters because the primary resources are finite (there are only so many original Greek texts) and you can get it online; it is the base of data that everyone draws there conclusions from the ancient world
On the other hand, what happens when you look at 20th century history and the endless amounts of content that are out there?
What happens when all the volumes in the world are digitized? Of all the primary sources out there, we only have so much money to digitize though…
What do we bring out that is trapped?
Within the disciplines, there is lots of room for advice from scholars on this
Someday, can we help make decisions about what is important in the field and what needs to be digitized?
Can we help develop the analytical tools to look at the data?
Can we do massive text mining?
Visualizations?
What about stimulating the demand for this new kind of scholarship?
Who wants to take a risk as a young scholar when it could fall flat on deaf ears or it could be the greatest thing since sliced bread?
Is there an in-between space that we can translate the goals of that vision on a reasonable scale?
Where does the money come from?
Most of the physical infrastructure in this country came in the early part of this century. The point is that we do no, as a country, invest in maintaining infrastructure. Universities do a little better at this, but there is more to do to mobilize these resources.
How do we build an ethos of openness and the public good, when the culture and legal structure locks data up and attaches ownership to them?
Social and cultural challenges
Institutional Roles
Incentives and rewards for scholars who take the risk to do research in these new ways
There are challenges to the ways of doing this work
Conservative, traditional modes of funding
Finding others to collaborate with
Tenure and what counts as legitimate contributions to scholarship
These are all ways of thinking in institutions that are deeply held and may not be antithetical to these newer notions, but certainly don’t jive with them either
Everyone’s work will change as a consequence of this shift
The role of the brick and mortar university will still attract students from a variety of backgrounds and these interactions will not go away
But, what is it that distinguishes one place from another, especially with this notion of openness?
What are universities doing to attract faculty?
What physical resources does the university have (librar, facilities)?
What happens when anyone can get access to these materials? What is the value added by the institution?
One of the questions also becomes whether or not we are willing to do something different as well as what we were doing before?
Can we teach as much and do elaborate research projects?
In libraries, for instance, if we are out there cataloging every web page like we do every book, then there are certain things we can and can not do with every resource.
Conceptual Challenges
If we want to draw a variety of perspectives into looking at the problems, then how do we maintain scientific rigor and have inclusion at the same time?
The wisdom of crowds argument
What if everyone in the crowd is wrong?
How far can we push this from opinion to educated judgment
Universities that have resources as compared to those who do not
Digital ivory tower
How do we convince skeptics of the potential without solid evidence?
Avoiding the “trust me” syndrome and making a case for how to spend money
Where to start?
Starting in the schools, doing things in a connected way is good, but they are doing things on a superficial level and we have not done a good job of packaging this information
Getting info from 19th century and putting it out there for people to gobble up
Getting the next generation of scholars being more insistent on this kind of work
Encourage the convinced to talk to those who “don’t get it”
Don’t want to be dismissive, but there are some who need to at least not stand in the way for others to bring this work forward
There are those who place lots of value in traditional kinds of work and we need to convince them that there are ways to do otherwise
Look at pockets of innovation and support that work rather than spread things too thin
There are things that people are doing, but don’t contribute to the infrastructure
We can stop doing some things if they don’t seem important
The world won’t come to an end if the pre-prints don’t come to the mailbox
Some kinds of work that might seem frivolous might come to be valuable in the end
The gaming metaphor and how there is something profound there
If you can learn by doing something with a game, we need to embrace that kind of shift in thinking
My Reflections
As I prepare materials for CMU’s online repository, CONDOR, I have been considering many of these same issues. What “counts” for me in terms of creating blog posts, wikis for my class, opening up content that has been published in “locked” journals? I want to be a young scholar who pushes these issues in my department, college, and university, yet I want tenure, too. I think that I am striking a good balance in doing the types of scholarship that is considered as legitimate by my colleagues and publishing in these types of open forums, yet there are still the nagging concerns that my work will not be understood. So, I continue with the both/and philosophy (publish in books and peer reviewed journals as well as in digital formats such as blogs, podcasts, and other forums).
Certainly, these will be issues that I wrestle with for years to come, if not my entire career, so hearing her talk today helped me see my concerns in a larger educational context.
March was like a lion for me… beginning, middle, and end. I wish there was a better excuse, but that’s the long and short of it. Conferences, prepping my portfolio for my annual review, teaching, grading, etc.
My main contribution to the presentation will be an annotated bibliography of sources on social networking in education. Here is what I have so far and I welcome any insights that you may have to add to this list. Feel free to comment here or jump right in and add something on the wiki:
Resources by Educators
Teachers Teaching Teachers: A weekly webcast that focuses on teaching writing with newer technologies, often related to social networking
ELGG Plans: The wiki that these teachers use to collaboratively compose curriculum
Youth Voices: The site for these teachers’ high school students
Youth Twitter: Another site for these teachers’ students, focused on the idea of microblogging
Also, I am trying to think about how to discuss the idea of social networking. What I have found with my experiences in using any social technology is that the teacher really is key to making it work. Be it a discussion board, a blog, a wiki, or a social network, if the teacher talks the talk about using technology, yet doesn’t walk the walk, then it is likely that the students won’t follow.
On a related note, I often wonder about our efforts as teachers to adapt technologies that students are using for their own personal purposes and then connecting it to more academic purposes. In what ways does this co-opting of the technology change the use of it, for better and for worse? For instance, in the social network Rob and I set up this semester, I decided not to make it a “requirement” for my ENG 315 class, and I noticed that very few students have been active in the network as an extra curricular activity. What if I had made it a requirement? Would obligatory postings be worthwhile for students? Would the network have grown more in an organic manner, even though I required it to be fertilized?
As I prepare to present this weekend, these thoughts continue to roll around in my head. In some ways, I don’t even know that I consider myself a proficient user of social networks, as I am in a number of Ning, Facebook, and other groups, yet rarely participate in any meaningful way. I am just wondering how the norms of social networking map on to the academic life of a university faculty member, let alone K-12 teachers and students. I know that they can (as the examples above show), but I am still struggling to make it work for my students.
