Category: Multiliteracies

Notes from Doug Hartman’s Talk at MRA 2010

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.”

Update – 3/30/10 – Embedded Slideshare Presentation

MRA 2010 Conference Session

He outlined four shifts that are happening as we continue to think about new literacies and technologies:

  • Shift 1: The technologies students use for reading and writing are changing
    • 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

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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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Composing Community

Image from www.lansingstatejournal.com
Image from www.lansingstatejournal.com

My friend and RCWP colleague, Marcus Brown, has been working for about a year to open the Village Summit in the house next door to his Lansing home. You can read about many of the trials and tribulations that Marcus, his wife, and everyone involved in creating the Village Summit have had to endure in this article from the Lansing State Journal.

In trying to figure out a way that I could help Marcus and his cause, he suggested that I spend some time with him and help develop a website for the center that highlights its services and activities. And here is where the power of  digital writing comes into the picture…

Marcus and I began talking about this last year and began a Google Site for his organization. As it does, time slipped by, we both neglected the website for a long while, and kind of forgot about it. But, when talking with him over breakfast in December, and trying to figure out how I could help, he began discussing all the ways in which we wanted to use a website to reach out to his community — people in his neighborhood helping with the Village Summit, other community organizations, the Lansing Mayor’s Office and City Council, and beyond. I was thinking about the software that he could use to compose this site, immediately moving my mind to the suite of tools that Google offers including Sites, Picasa, Maps, and Calendar. After working together for the better part of two hours, we updated the site, adding images, maps, and a calendar, not to mention a good deal of Marcus’s writing and poetry that show his passion for education and serving his community.

And, so, in less than two hours, the Village Summit had a (revised) website.

On the one hand, we could look at this as nothing remarkable. Yep, we have Google Sites and can insert plug-ins and, wow, doesn’t that make life easier for us when we make web pages.

Yet, in digging a little deeper and thinking about the socio-cultural, technical, and political literacy practices associated with how Marcus composed a site about a community center for a variety of audiences and purposes, I find the digital writing task in which the two of us were engaged to be quite fascinating. To be sure, even a few years ago, he could have created a similar site with a variety of web-based tools or software. It would have taken awhile, and he would have likely had to use a site like Geocities that put ads on his work (or buy a domain).

But, using this suite of Google tools, and having a specific set of purposes and audiences in mind, he was able to compose a multimedia text — a website that employs text, links to videos, images, and maps — to distribute his message. Composing community. All in about two hours. In less time than it used to take us to design, produce content for, and upload a basic website using Dreamweaver and FTP.

And, it’s free.

And, it’s collaborative, so others can add content.

And, it’s a public voice for a community that, even a few years ago may not have had the time or resources to develop a web-based message.

To me, as a teacher of digital writing, this was really an epiphany. Yes, of course I knew that anyone could hop online and make a site, or a blog, or a wiki, or a twitter account. Yes, I realized that our digital writing can be collaborative and shared widely. Yet, I didn’t think very clearly, until that day when Marcus and I met, about the power of digital writing — in really just a moment — to compose entire communities, to bring something into existence in ways that would have been difficult or impossible even a few years ago. I had heard of it happening with different tools, over time. But, in just under two hours, we were able to take what Marcus had started a year ago as a dream, and what we initially tried to capture on the web last summer, and brought them both together.

For me, watching Marcus connect his many literacy practices and personal passions to create this website show the heart of what it means to be multiliterate in a digital world.

Thanks, Marcus, for reminding me of it, and for all that you do to serve your community.


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Framing an Approach to the Digital Writing Workshop

After a wonderful week in Philly and while reflecting on my experiences at the NWP Annual Meeting, “Digital Is” Conference, and NCTE Convention, I was fortunate enough to engage with a Michigan colleague who, as a part of her master’s program, is doing an inquiry project on establishing her own digital writing workshop. She had picked up my book (thanks!) and then had some questions for me, specifically related to her teaching context. With her permission, I share excerpts of our email conversation here in hopes that it may be useful for some of you attempting to establish digital writing workshops in your own classrooms and schools. The exchange begins with her first question, and I have indented my responses for clarity.

1.  Access is my biggest issue.  Currently, I share a laptop cart of 20 with the whole school (about 220 kids).  I do have 5 computers in my classroom, but I am unable to sign out the cart on most days, leaving me one day a week (to compete with the whole school) to sign out the laptops.  I am currently dreaming and searching for grants to get more computers for my own classroom, but access continues to be an issue.  Not all of my students have access to computers or internet at home, and most aren’t able to use a computer during the school day.  (The competition to use one of the classroom computers can be pretty stiff, especially since many of my students have computer usage written into their IEP…  leaving all the others without class time access.)  How does one go “fully digital” without access?  Do I make blogging their weekly writing a requirement and then have them come in during lunch or after school?  Or do I wait on that part until I know everyone has fair access?

I am in a fairly fortunate position…  my class sizes are small.  But how much do I push the envelope?

You have two problems here — the immediate and long term need for access. So, I will address both.

First, for the short term, no, you should not wait. Kids, and parents, are resourceful, and if you create an assignment and give them a fair amount of time (one post per week, with one response to a peer, perhaps), then I think that it is more than fair to require that as homework. If you make extra time available at lunch or after school, in addition to the one day a week that they have in your class, then this is even more fair. Sadly, we will never have equal access (which is what I think you mean be “fair access”) and I don’t think that should preclude students engaging in digital writing. So, your plan is reasonable. Push the envelope, not only because you know it is pedagogically sound, but because you know that students can rise to these expectations so long as you make them reasonable.

A more long term question is embedded in your desire to get grants to buy more machines. With tools like netbooks and iPod touches as very low cost, that might be your best entry point for a one-to-one system. Honestly, you won’t have full access in your classroom unless your school supports a building-wide initiative, or you get your own for your classroom. So, that is an admirable goal, but I would really encourage you to push for a school-wide initiative in order to make substantive changes in the ways that students and your colleagues engage with technology. You might want to look at this book to help make an argument about why and how laptops can support student learning: Warschauer, M. (2006). Laptops and literacy: Learning in the wireless classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

In short, you are thinking about this in all the right ways. Trying to make things fair for all of our students is the sign of a passionate teacher, and I appreciate your efforts. That said, I can understand why you feel you are not being fair. One blog post a week, I can assure you, is a fair assignment, and one that moves your students in the right direction to becoming digital writers.
 

2.  Some of my parents are concerned about their child’s off task behavior while  on the internet.  One parent has demanded that we not let her child use the computer at school at all, because she can’t be monitored well enough.  This child is only in 6th grade, so I will continue to have her for 2 more years.  Any ideas to help sway her parents?

The best response that I have heard to this is from a colleague, Bud Hunt (who blogs at http://budtheteacher.com/blog/). Basically, he says that it’s not the internet that makes the kid go to Facebook/IM/game sites/etc. It’s the kid. Your job is to help teach the kid to be productive, ethical, and responsible online. But, that’s part of her parents’ job, too. And, filtering/censoring the internet is not going to solve that. Keeping her offline at school, in short, is not going to help her be a better digital writer nor is it going to help her learn behaviors that are going to make her a good digital citizen. We have to recognize that kids, and all of us, can and should have time to play and explore online, and that should be balanced with doing work. This is true offline as well. So, your job is to help the parents see that it’s not the internet that is distracting their daughter, it’s their daughter that’s distracting their daughter. Show them what you are asking her to do, talk about how that should be engaging her, and then discuss what other reasons might be present for why she is not engaging in the digital writing task (is she a struggling writer? are other kids in the class not responding to her writing? other?)

3.  What do you say to those that value the very traditional 5 paragraph essay “make my kid ready for the MEAP and ACT” kinds of writing, and do not believe that digital story telling, podcasting, and creating PSAs will help their child learn the so called “nuts and bolts” of writing?  Thankfully, I do not get a lot of that at my school…  but I am sure others face it quite a bit.

Like crafting a blog post, composing a digital story, or writing a letter, the writing a 5 paragraph essay is one type of genre that students need to master for a specific writing context. My argument for focusing on digital writing is simple — use the MAPS heuristic and help students talk about the mode, media, audience, purpose, and situation of a given writing task, then use that language across tasks. So, as they compose a blog post, talk with them about the similarities and differences between writing that post as compared to a traditional essay. When kids understand the rhetorical choices that they are making, then they will be better able to discern how and why to make these choices.

Moreover, if kids are engaged in authentic writing tasks through digital storytelling and other means, then it will give them more fodder to choose from for these exams. That is, if they are passionately writing about their own ideas in a variety of other contexts, then when it comes time to perform on the state test, then they will have a variety of ideas to choose from. Rather than drilling them with decontextualized prompts each day, engage them in real writing, and they will be able to craft an essay when they need to.

Beyond that, one footnote. The best MEAP essays are NOT five-paragraph ones. I know that you know this, but point parents to the MEAP released items and talk with them about what the best essays look like. Talk with your kids about it, too. Then, see how that type of essay writing can be fostered by making good rhetorical choices (ala the choices one makes as a digital writer).
 

4.  Just for fun… 
What has been your favorite digital writing workshop activity to experience?
What activity has been the most valuable as far as engaging students in writing, both in and out of class?

I love digital storytelling. Love creating them. Love teaching them.

That said, my favorite and most valuable activity is having my students create a writer’s profile. I am copying and pasting the next few paragraphs from a blog post I made on the Ning a few months back…

At the beginning of each writing class that I teach, I invite students to “interview” each other with Nancie Atwell’s writing survey from In the Middle. While they are interviewing each other, I walk around the room and, with their permission, take their picture with a digital camera. This encourages some offline collaboration that then turns into the basis for their online relationships as readers and responders.

After the interviews, they then take the answers to the questions that they gave, and begin to create an individual page with an autobiographical profile on our class wiki. Before class begins, I have already created a list of students on a page of the wiki, so that they can then link their profile to the class list.

Often times, over the course of the semester, this profile page grows as they add their writing territories (Atwell), responses to a “50 questions” activity I lead them through,” and links to the writing pieces that they are developing over the semester. Also, other students can go into the wiki and comment on each other’s profiles, including responses to writing. These profile pages grow and change over the semester, just as they grow and change as writers.

Two examples of these class pages linked to individual profiles can be found in my ENG 315 course and this summer’s Chippewa River Writing Project.

 

Thanks for supporting me on my quest to “digitize” my writing workshop!

 

You are welcome, and thanks for taking the next steps — I applaud your enthusiasm and professionalism. I look forward to hearing about your work.

Cross-posted on the Digital Writing Workshop Ning.

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Notes from “Erasing Copyright Confusion” at NCTE 2009

Notes from “Erasing Copyright Confusion” at NCTE 2009

Joyce Valenza, Renee Hobbs, Kristin Hokanson, and Michael RobbGrieco

Center for Social Media

  • Renee Hobbs, Temple — What is the purpose of copyright?
    • Protect intellectual property
    • Ownership, profit
    • Authors’ right
  • In fact, the purpose of copyright is to promote creativity, innovation, and the spread of knowledge
    • Owners have pushed for longer length of copyright
  • How we Cope as Educators with Copyright
    • “See no evil” teachers — don’t examine copyright issues at all
    • “Close the door” teachers — know that there is something to copyright, yet keep it private
    • “Hyper-comply” teachers — they hold on to this idea more strongly for their students than themselves
  • When I use creative materials, which concepts apply?
    • Attribution — citing your sources (an academic community’s normative conventions that they agree upon to acknowledge other’s work)
    • Plagiarism — not acknowledging source material used in your work
    • Infringement — copying another’s work in violation of the law
    • Fair Use — the legal use of copyrighted works without permission or payment
    • Licensing — Asking permission and paying a fee
  • Copyright balances the rights of owners with the rights of users
    • Owners get to control how their work is controlled and distributed for a limited use of time
    • As users, however, we have some rights, too
    • All those things you knew about the “30 second rule,” the “10% rule,” the “45 day rule” are not the law
      • The charts that you see, they are not the law — they are negotiated agreements that have “the appearance of positive law”
      • The guidelines actually limit our understandings of fair use
      • You can use copyrighted material in a variety of ways — criticism, comment, news reporting, scholarship AND creative work
      • Peter Jazi — the benefits to society outweigh the private costs to the copyright holder, or else copyright law becomes a form of private censorship
  • Michael RobbGrieco, Temple — Responding to the Rise of Remix Culture: Challenges and opportunities for teaching, learning, and literacy
    • Are you a part of remix culture?
      • Build on others?
      • Quote passages?
      • Do you have a website?
    • Our students are fully immersed in a remix culture
      • Remix is how our students add their own personal experience to the wider culture and make their experience known to others
      • Can remix perpetuate cultural norms that are oppressive?
      • Critical remix for democracy, dialogue, and exchange
      • Single Ladies in Mayberry
    • Develop media literacy skills
      • Balancing producer and consumer identities
      • Can create shallow engagement without critical interpretation (this is where educators come in)
      • How do we realize the potential of fair use while also facing the challenges that are present?
      • How can we be critical with our students and invite interpretation and argument?
      • Michael’s video: Copyright, What’s Copyright?
  • Kristin Hokanson, Upper Merion High School
    • What does it mean to add value to other people’s work?
    • Use of Flickr images for a biology project
    • Use of Dave Matthews “Gravedigger” with Spoon River Anthology
    • Media Lab’s “Teach Them to Reason” tool
    • Ending Copyright Confusion Wiki
    • Attribution is an ethical practice, not a legal one; citing sources doesn’t let you off the hook
    • Fair use is a reasoning process that requires critical thinking; context and situation determine how fair use applies.
    • Am I creating something new (through transformative use), or am I redistributing (which is, in contrast, a violation of the law)?
  • Joyce Valenza, Springfield Township High School
  • This project is a user-rights movement
    • The Code of Best Practices for Fair Use is NCTE’s official policy on fair use
    • 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


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Notes from Danielle Nicole DeVoss’s Opening Keynote at NWP’s “Digital Is…”

Danielle Nicole DeVoss asks us to think about what digital was then and is now…

Digital is…

  • Networked — we compose in networked spaces
  • Collaborative — people are able to connect and create through these networks (LolCats)
  • Multimodal — typography, kinetic type, digital stories
  • Re-Mediated — taking a media object and recreating it so it moves across media; moving across text to audio to video (StarzBunnies)
  • Remixed — taking bits and pieces and parts of other media to create new messages and meaning
  • Policed — digital millennium copyright act; You Tube copyright issues (Fair Use)
  • (Requires) Critical thinking — because of the visuals (Harry Potter, Redbook)
  • (Can be) Democratic — Iran and Twitter, YouTube Debates

Writing is Digital — this is, as Elyse put it, our moment.


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Notes from “Digital Storytelling: Enhancing Language, Visual, and Media Literacies”

Digital Storytelling: Enhancing Language, Visual, and Media Literacies

MRA 2009 Presentation

Ledong Li, Tingfeng Luo, Wen Wu, Fan Zhang, Oakland University

  • What’s Your Story?

  • Stories Surround Us

  • What is digital storytelling?

    • Daniel Meadows: “short personal multimedia tales told
      from the heart”

  • Educational Use of Digital Storytelling

    • Focus on specific topic and contain a particular point of
      view

    • Topics range from personal tales recounting historical
      events, exploring life in one’s own community, to the search for life
      in other corners of the universe

    • They can vary in length, but in education they typically
      last between 2-10 minutes

  • Procedure

    • Write script

    • Collect assets

    • Create storyboard

    • Draft, edit, and finalize

    • Publish it as a movie file

  • Hardware

    • Computer

    • External hard drive/flash drive

    • Headset with microphone

    • Scanner

    • Digital Camera/Digital Video Camera

    • Facilities with access to internet

  • Software

    • Movie Tools: Flash, Premiere, Photostory, Movie Maker,
      iMovie

    • Imaging Tools: Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, iPhoto

    • Audio: Audition, iTunes, Garageband, Audacity

    • Players: Windows Media Player, iTunes, VLC, Flash

  • Why digital storytelling?

    • Storytelling has been important to individuals since the
      early days of civilization

    • In education, storytelling remains a way to teach subtle
      points and make elusive abstractions concrete

    • With the latest development of computers, multimedia
      systems, and the Internet, “images, sounds, animations, and video
      clips” can be brought together with “texts,” providing a wide range of
      story formats

  • The Changing World

    • Friedman, “The World is Flat”

      • Globalization 1.0 (1492 – 1800) Countries/trade

      • Globalization 2.0 (1800 – 2000) Companies/labor

      • Globalization 3.0 (2000 – Present) Individuals/internet

  • Moving from web 1.0 to web 2.0

    • Mode: Reading to writing

    • Primary Unit of Content: Page to post

    • State: Static to dynamic

    • Viewed through: Web browser to Browsers, RSS Readers,
      phones

    • Architecture: Client server to web services

    • Content created by: Web coders to everyone

    • Domain of: Geeks to “mass amateurization”

  • What does this mean for learning?

    • Obvious answers

      • New technologies and tools

      • Different workflow processes

      • Competition and expectations of end users

    • Less obvious answers

      • New expectations for the relationship between learners
        and instructors

      • New modes of writing and communication

      • New literacies

  • Web 2.0 to Literacy 2.0

    • Web 2.0 – business model focused on a service rather than
      product that values participation, collaboration, and distribution

    • Literacy 2.0 – students are appropriating digital
      applications, networks, and services; they are developing new ways of
      reading, writing, viewing, listening, and recording — new ways that
      embody this 2.0 environment

    • Literacy 2.0 necessarily involves extensive
      participation, collaboration, and distribution of expertise and
      intelligence

  • Purpose of our Study

    • Engaging graduate students (in-service teachers) and
      undergraduates (pre-service teachers) in how to make digital stories

    • Examine the potential of digital storytelling used to
      enhance traditional and new literacies

    • Bridging literacy methods, changing perspectives, how to
      inform instruction

  • Roles that participants played

    • Writers

    • Text editors

    • Visual designers

    • Image editors

    • Voice recording specialists

    • Audio editing

    • Movie producers

  • Impacts on education

    • Practical and learner-centered

    • Meets ed tech standards

    • Enhances literacies: language, visual, media

    • Helps build useful skills in web 2.0/literacy 2.0:
      participation, collaboration, distribution

Announcing MIT’s International Journal of Learning and Media

Today, I received an exciting announcement from Kellie Bramlet with MIT Press Journals. In addition to the series of books that they released last year with a Creative Commons license, they are now offering the following new journal:

The International Journal of Learning and Media

MIT Press, in cooperation with The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), is pleased to announce the publication of the first issue of The International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM). A first of its kind, the journal is devoted to examining the intersection of media and learning in multiple contexts. Volume 1, Issue 1, edited by David Buckingham, Tara McPherson and Katie Salen, is now available for FREE at http://ijlm.net . While IJLM retains the peer-review process of a traditional scholarly journal, its editorial vision and electronic-only format permit more topical and polemic writing, visual and multimedia presentations, and online dialogues. IJLM will allow the broad community interested in digital media and learning to share its insights using the tools of digital media. Sections of the journal range from shorter pieces on critical issues of a timely nature, through longer essays on keywords shaping the landscape of learning and media today, to traditional peer-reviewed scholarly articles.

http://ijlm.net is currently in its beta stage and we welcome your comments, questions and thoughts on how to improve the site. Please contact us by clicking on the Feedback button in the upper right corner at http://ijlm.net

The development and publication of IJLM is supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its 5-year, $50 million, initiative in digital media and learning.

Notes from RCWP Google Day

Notes from Andrea Zellner‘s RCWP Google Day Presentation

  • Reflecting on Google Teacher Academy
    • Thinking about the tools almost exclusively, and we want to focus on literacy practices
  • Writing prompt:
    • What is Literacy? What is Technological Literacy? How are they different? How do they support one another?
      • Literacy — the ability read, write, listen, speak, view, and visually represent texts in print and non-print media. Technology literacy — the ability to understand and employ different tools (pencils and paper, computers, cameras, recorders, etc.) to effectively convey a message to an audience.
      • The ways in which these two concepts, literacy and technology literacy support one another — we have come to understand that being “literate” changes across contexts, thus it is a complicated set of practices that people use to communicate for a variety of purposes and audiences. Adding technology into the mix opens up new opportunities for communication and collaboration that makes us rethink the ways in which we consider what it means to be literate. In other words, technology has the potential to affect our worldview because it changes the way that literacy is enacted. in these contexts. And, in an increasingly digital world, we have to make the connections between literacies and technologies more and more explicit so readers and writers understand how, why, and when to use particular technologies to communicate.
    • We can sometimes forget the fact that literacy is what we are most interested in and can get caught up in the technology itself
  • Framing our thinking about the teaching of writing with the strategies from the Writing Next Report
  • Writing prompt: Portfolios
    • Yes, I use portfolios in my English Education methods class, ENG 315. I think that the immediate benefit of using a digital portfolio, as it has always been with portfolios, is that students see the value in collecting and reflecting on their work over time. The digital portfolio offers them even more flexible ways of presenting their work, as they can create straight-up web pages and they can embed images, video, or audio. This allows for multimedia compositions that wouldn’t necessarily be possible with print-based portfolios.
    • Drawbacks. Well, let’s face it… assessing any writing is tough work, especially when you are trying to assess a collection of writing that has been developed over time. Thus, I have my students engage in self-assessment for their portfolios. This is the only way that I have found really gets them engaged in the process as writers, forcing them to be thoughtful in the selection process and be honest about the amount of work that has gone into the writing and revising process.
  • Playing with the tools — check out Andrea’s site for links
  • Ideas for Inspiration
    • Students with autism using SketchUp
  • Writing Prompt: Think of a student who was challenged to write in your classroom.
    • My most difficult student that I ever had to deal with was one of my seventh graders. Along with all the special education diagnoses that he had been given, he was also just not a friendly kid. Not outright defiant, nor anti-social, but just difficult to connect with. At the time, I tried to offer him some options for writing with technology such as creating a PPT, but I wasn’t really equipped to differentiate instruction or help him grow as a writer. I do wonder how a student like him would react to some of the newer tools that we have been discussing today, as well as to the chance to easily get feedback from other writers and not just me. Taking his writing public might have made a difference (and, simply typing it would have helped, too). All in all, I think that the challenges he faced were partly motivational and partly learning disabilities, and I wonder how these tools might have been helpful for him.
  • How might these Google Tools impact literacy?
  • Our collaborative Google Presentation
  • Final reflection — what was your biggest “aha” and what will you take back to your classroom?
    • The major tech tip that I will take back with me is the Google Scholar setting that allows you to export directly to EndNote/Zotero. That is going to be just so incredibly useful for me. Once Zotero gets set up to share your libraries easily, it will be great. I can create online reading lists of open source readings or readings that can be accessed on campus, and skip the whole process of having to create course reserves!
    • In terms of professional development structures, I really like how Andrea framed the day with the early discussion of literacy and technology. She made it clear that this was a discussion about how to use the Google Applications in the service of literacy instruction and not just about “this tool, that tool, and the next tool.” That was good to make her ideas about that explicit early in the presentation, even though the rest of the day did kind of suffer from the “mile wide, inch deep” problem.
    • Finally, I enjoyed having to articulate my thoughts about a particular tool during the last activity. By comparing Knol with Wikipedia, it forced me to come back to the ideas about literacy practices. That might have been helpful to include as a framework for the final activity — a reminder that we should look at the tool as a way to support literacy practices.

All in all, a great day with lots to think about. Thanks, Andrea!

Reflections on the Semester and the Season

Been trying to get focused on writing for the books again tonight, but catching up on RSS reading and some recent posts from Andrea, Aram, and Sara reminded me to take some time with family and catch up on some personal reading (besides RSS feeds).

So, I figured I would reflect on a few things from this semester and then probably not blog again until after the new year, so I can so hopefully I can get caught up on those books and then be able to turn my attention to my kids and family over the holidays. In no particular order, here are three things that have been making me think as the semester comes to a close:

1. Reflecting on the experience of conducting a webinar

As I think about what I consider to be elements of “best practice” in teaching teachers how to integrate literacy with technology, two major points are clear: they need hands-on experience and time to play with technology outside the pressures of the classroom. While preparing for and conducting the webinar, I was continually reminded of the time constraint that we were under (apx. 50 minutes to present) and the fact that all the technologies we would introduce would not only not be played with by the teachers during the session, but would only be alluded to with links to resources later. Part of that was simply the function of the webinar, and I am OK with that. Yet, part of it seems to be that we have yet to fully embrace the idea of play in learning to teach, and especially in learning to teach with technology. My hope is that, given the opportunity to do a webinar again, I will be able to think about how to focus on something specific so that participants can walk away with a clear understand of what to do, as well as why and how to do it.

In short, the experience conducting the webinar — as well as the overall outcomes of the webinar itself — were good, based on the original intent we had for it. Now, I just need to reconsider what my intent for another webinar (or similar web-based presentations) would be. This will be important as we consider the work of our new writing project site at CMU.

2. Reflecting on teaching a senior seminar in 21st Century Literacies

This semester, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to teach ENG 460, a senior seminar where students develop a final research project related to the course theme; in our case, this was 21st century literacies. My requirement for the final projects that students created was that it had to include some form of multimedia, and making a power point was the bare minimum. As I reflect on the final student projects — which included websites, informational videos, hyperlinked slide shows, and one student who created a Knol — I see a variety of topics that all integrated multimedia in some way. That is good.

Yet, it is clear that some students “got it,” and were really able to take advantage of the multimedia component, combining their own original content with links to other resources and/or representing their content in critical and creative ways through audio, video, or multimedia. On the other hand, there were some students who simply delivered a pretty standard presenation and, instead of having a power point, made a basic web page, moving through their presentation with minimal interactivity and effective use of multimedia. Or, they just gathered other people’s multimedia and put it all together into one website.

I say all of this cautiously, for as a teacher I don’t want to offend any of my students or call them out, especially since they have made their work public and most were composing in digital environments for the first time. Instead, I want to say it simply to give myself pause to think about how I will frame projects like this in the future and how I will talk about the effective use of multimedia and design in light of creating a meaningful and substantive presentation.

I’m still learning, too.

3. Reflecting on teaching a writing methods course

ENG 315 gets more fun every time I teach it. I feel like I have finally hit my stride in terms of the content and pace of the course, as well as the technologies that I ask my pre-service teachers to engage with as they develop their voices as writers and teachers of writing. In particular, this semester I had them blogging their professional reading responses, sharing their field notes with my via Google Docs, and creating their own wiki page. I also invited, but did not require, them to make a podcast or digital story.

As I think about what I will do next semester, I am going to continue pushing in these directions and make some slight changes. First, for their portfolio of personal writing, a requirement will be that one of the pieces is digital. It can be an online photo essay, a podcast, a digital story, a piece of hypertext fiction, or a “kiosk” style presentation with hyper links, but I will make the requirement that at least one piece have a digital component.

Also, I am going to require that either their portfolio of writing or their multigenre project be presented as a website.

Finally, I am going to make a more concious effort to have them create a personal learning network, both inside and outside the class, using RSS, blogging, and microblogging. I am not sure if I want to move from a wiki to Ning as my primary means of communicating with students, so I have to give that some more thought.

The challenge for all of this, of course, is making sure that I continually remind them of how this connects to the writing process and will be applicable to them as teachers as well as to their K-8 student writers. But, it is a challenge that I seem to get better at overcoming each semester that I teach.

Well, that is about it for tonight, and for the semester. I really need to turn my attention to writing for the books and we have many weeks of busy family time planned over the holidays, so most likely I won’t post again until the new year. While 2008 has been successful professionally, my hope is that 2009 will prove to be a better year for me personally and for my family, too. So, I need some time to just pause and think about all that lies ahead. Thanks again to my friends and colleagues for reminding me to take some time to do that.

I wish you all a safe, restful, and joyous holiday season. See you in 2009.


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