Today, I am at Fordham University, presenting at their summer literacy institute focusing on 21st Century Literacies. I am honored to have the opportunity to present with Kathi Yancey, and she is currently in the middle of her session about “Blogging Alive,” asking participants to think about the purposes and audiences for blogging.
She began by asking people to make a concept map of their blog search, beginning by choosing a question and then using Google blog search to find anwers to their question. She made the point that she was less concerned about the answer to the question than about the process of the search itself. She asked students to then create a concept map outlining their search, and to make sure to include the links from one blog post to another, thus showing the nodes that developed.
Next, she discussed a variety of purposes for blogging, including students writing to and with each other. She also suggested that students connecting their school lives with the world such as the the blog of unecessary quotation marks.
Finally, she asked how we might use blogs as spaces for online learning this year. She talked about the ideas of “misfires” and “workarounds.” Misfires in the sense that an assignment designed for a particular purpose doesn’t really work the way it is supposed to, but you can learn from it. Workaround in the sense that you may have planned for one thing, but got another (e.g., planned for a lab, but only got one computer in your classroom). She also shared Wordle, and showed us how to make a Wordle image from the words we used to describe the MAPS of digital writing this morning.
Image created using www.wordle.net
An enjoyable day all around, I appreciate the invitation from Marshall George to present as a part of the 21st Century Literacies institute this year.
Apologies in advance for what will be a long post here, as my “reflection in action” during the conference consisted more of trying to find free wifi and navigating the Riverwalk than it did of actually having time to sit down and think. I tried to break my thinking up by day, for what that’s worth, and hope that these thoughts are useful for all my readers, especially all my colleagues who were unable to attend.
That said, NWP/NCTE2008 was a wonderful week of connecting and collaborating with colleagues, and there is so much to think about it is hard to know where to begin. So, I will organize it by day.
One thing that I will note here and throughout the rest of this post is that I sensed a definite shift, a change in the tone about how people are talking about newer literacies and technologies. In a sense, it is as if we no longer had to begin every conversation, every presentation with a disclaimer: “let me tell you why I use technology in my teaching of writing.” Instead, the conversations simply began with the premise that we simply are using technology to teach writing.
And that is darn cool.
Now for a summary of the week.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Wednesday brought me in early to work on a book project with NWP, and we had some great discussions about the state of digital writing as well as the Letters to the President Project. Having been in the process of interviewing a number of educators this fall, getting this day to work with Danielle and then meet with Elyse
and Christina from NWP brought some clarity to my thinking (something that has been sorely lacking as I have been digging through loads and loads of data). I feel very confident in the work that we did and that the book will be useful for educators in a variety of contexts.
I was able to interview someone from Google about the use of Google Docs in education, and that conversation (among the many I have had with NWP colleagues) reminds me that things are definitely changing. Yes, there are still issues of access and the digital divide. Yet, I think that students and teachers are finding more and more opportunities for thinking about how to teach digital writing because the tools are (almost) all online and (almost) all free. Not to go overboard on the idea of the conference theme, but I could finally see the revolution in action over the course of this weekend. Teachers are beginning, across the board, to make the shift.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
On Thursday, the NWP Annual Meeting kicked off and, for me at least, the best part of the day was the new site meeting. I enjoyed the Writing in a Digital Age session, but then got caught up in other things all afternoon, in particular some great news… Last week, on my birthday, I was pleased to learn from NWP’s Executive Director that Central Michigan University had been awarded an NWP site! Thus, this was my first official meeting as a new site director. When asked how I was feeling, all weekend long I repeated the “excited, but terrified” mantra. Attending the NWP Annual Meeting as a site director was a new experience, and again I was amazed at the ways in which technology and writing were simply a part of the same conversation now. As I begin to think about how to frame the work of our new site, I am encouraged by
the fact that being digital will be a major part of who we are. A talk with Bud Hunt later in the weekend reaffirmed this belief that our site should intertwine our web presence with our core work, and I look forward to tackling that when I get home.
Also, another cool aspect of Thursday was that I was interviewed by Paul and a crew from the Pearson Foundation about how writing is changing in a digital age. They were getting interview with a large number of TCs throughout the annual meeting, and I can’t wait to see how the videos they will be producing turn out.
Here are some of my thoughts from my preparations for that interview:
Why is writing important now?
As it has always been, writing remains a key mode of communication. It is important today because writers in a variety of personal and professional roles are being asked to produce a greater variety of texts, for a greater variety of audiences.While many teachers — especially those involved with NWP initiatives — continue to build on the principles of good writing instruction, we need to continue our efforts and supporting the teaching and learning of writing in all of our classrooms, K-12, and across content areas. As writers adapt to new situations for composing texts, they need to be adept in a variety of writing skills and genres.We, as educators, are the ones who introduce them to these skills and genres when we keep our attention on teaching writing with intention.
Writing in a technological world means what?
In an increasingly networked world, writers need to adapt to different purposes, audiences, and contexts for writing that have been enabled by newer technologies. This also involves a shift in how we think about who writers are, how texts are produced, and where texts are distributed.
Regardless of how “digital” we think our students are — and, no doubt, most of them are more adept at particular digital skills like using Facebook, Twitter, or text messaging, they do not necessarily come to those tasks with the capacities that make them critical and creative digital writers. Not only do they need to understand the technical aspects of creating hyperlinks, posting to a blog, or collaborating with a wiki, but they need to have the intentional focus as a writer to understand the audience and purpose for which they are writing. Who reads your Facebook updates and why? Can you write to that audience in the same manner as a you can when you produce an academic paper, even if it is posted on a blog?
Moreover, they need to consider the ways in which we can compose with multiple modes and media. For instance, one can argue a position through a traditional essay, a 30 second public service announcement (either an audio or video), or in the form of a single-page advertisement with an image and few words, or no words at all. Understanding when, why, and how to use different forms of media to convey a particular message requires a working knowledge of the mode — that is, what does an audience expect in order to be persuaded — and how to effectively manipulate the media.
So, writing has always been a complex act, and newer technologies offer writers numerous opportunities to get their message across. Writing in a technological world means that we, as writers and teachers of writing, need to be aware of these choices and how we can best utilize them to have the intended effect on our various audiences.
One disappointment… no more Tech Matters. That institute, more than anything else I have done, has shaped my thinking on teaching digital writing. I will miss it dearly, but understand the choice that was made to go to a more site-focused technology retreat. So, while I am sad to know that Tech Matters is no more, I am encouraged by the work that is happening across the NWP network related to digital writing. There are some promising things on the horizon, one of which I hope becomes this book project.
Thursday night ended with our traditional RCWP dinner. Janet thanked all of us and praised our new site, but I want to say thank you, Janet, both for dinner and for all that you have done to enable teacher leaders to fill entire tables at an annual meeting, reflecting on a year of shared work.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Friday brought breakfast with a friend I hadn’t seen in some time as well as the invitation to be interviewed for NCTE’s Centennial film being produced by John Golden and his colleagues. Wow, what an incredible honor to be invited into that work. He asked me to reflect on how the teaching of writing has changed over the past few years with the advent of Web 2.0. What an honor and a wonderful opportunity. In preparation for that interview, I wrote the following:
The read/write web has finally delivered the promise of having a real audience and varied purposes that writing teachers have so long looked to bring to their classrooms. From the beginning of the process writing movement, when Emig first looked at the composing process and Sommers identified revision strategies of experienced and novice writers, teacher researchers such as Murray, Graves, Calkins, Atwell, Ray, Fletcher, Portalupi, and others have been trying to invite student writers to see audiences and purposes beyond the classroom and traditional school genres. While this began to occur in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000’s, there was still something “fake” about this writing. Yes, it was shared with peers in class. Yes, it was read at author’s chair or published in a school anthology. Yes, it went home and made it on the fridge. And, if it was lucky, that student writing made it to a local newspaper or other venue for publication. When the internet really hit big at the turn of the 21st century, writing teachers felt as if they could have a purpose and audience beyond the classroom and school. Some were able to publish their writing online, but things got in the way: FTP, limited or no access to the server, passwords, firewalls, as well as the onerous HTML editors. The promise of the web was to democratize information, and it did — if you could figure out how to create web pages and uploaded them. Even discussion forums — with all their ability to post and respond to writing — hit the scene, there was still something impersonal and difficult about “publishing” one’s writing.
Then, when read/write web tools such as blogs and wikis emerged, and “push button publishing” become possible for anyone, anywhere. Along with the increased bandwidth and access to internet-enabled computers in schools, the ability to post and share writing on a blog was revolutionary. Finally, the goal of “publishing” work for an authentic audience and purpose emerged as a goal for writers, both in and out of school. No longer did a writer need to know HTML (although it helped),
or have a specified program on his or her computer. We could write (and publish our writing) any time, any where.
This has resulted in a shift in thinking that Knobel and Lankshear discuss in their work on New Literacies. In a nutshell, the traditional vision that we have of a single writer, working alone on a piece of writing that has been culled together from a series of authoritative sources has been replaced with one of a collaborator who is able to build on the ideas of others, and participate in what boyd calls
“networked publics.” We can access our documents any time and any where that has a network connection, including on handheld devices and mobile phones.
What this means is that — in addition to being able to write in multiple modalities and media — students must be made aware of the ways in which their writing is distributed and perceived across the many networks in which they participate. What this means for teachers — and NCTE — is that we need to consider the many ways in which students see themselves as writers (and, according to the Pew report sometimes do not see themselves as writers) and invite them to be intentional about how they read and write in a digital age.
We have learned a great deal about revision and how audience and purpose can lead to intentional writing. NCTE should continue to support scholarship and professional development that builds on the principles and research findings that we have, noting the ways in which we as teachers can guide “digital natives” who may know how to send a “tweet,” but may not always be thinking about the ways such a message can be interpreted. In short, we need to continue the professional conversations that we have been having about writing and revision over the past three decades, taking what we know about these processes and moving them into the era of the read/write web.
NCTE continues to move in the right direction. In just the past year, they have adopted the statement on teaching multimodal literacies, and released two research and policy briefs (one specifically on 21st century literacies and the “Writing Now” brief that encompasses a broader view of the composing process). By offering the summer institute on 21st century literacies, webinars, and the “Tech to Go” sessions at the conference this year, NCTE keeps moving ahead with this work in practical manners. The website redesign and Inbox blog offer good examples of how NCTE is trying to stay in touch with members.
Doing that interview really helped me articulate my thinking, and I appreciate the opportunity to have done it.
Friday morning brought me to my first presentation with some NWP colleagues, “Revising the Writing Process: New Literacies in the English Classroom.” Paul Allison, Chris Sloan, Aram Kabodian, and Dawn Reed were able to present their work related to blogging, podcasting, digital storytelling, and social networking to a crowd of over 100 (don’t believe me — check out the pictures below!). I won’t go into detail on the session, as we have all our materials on our wiki, but suffice it to say that the work these four shared is both amazing and timely. Participants left with only a tiny handout — a bookmark with our URL on it — but loads and loads of ideas. I think that my friend and Project WRITE colleague Liz Webb recorded the session as a podcast, and I will try to get a link to it.
Friday dinner brought together friends and alums from MSU, packing a restaurant. A few of us ended up in the Italian place next door when the tables overflowed. Despite missing the conversation with the large group, it was great to spend time with so many people who have ties to the green and white, even if just for a short while.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Saturday brought a meeting with my editor on another book project, on that I will be very excited to return to as the semester comes to a close and hopefully involve some Project WRITE teachers (as well as their students). Then I was off to present at my Tech To Go kiosk for “RSS Feeds and Teaching English.” Again, more of the work of that session can be found on my wiki, so I want to reflect for a moment on the process of presenting that session (thanks to Bud Hunt for the photo).
My thoughts on the Tech To Go session are mixed, but all in a good way. On the one hand, I wanted to have it be a little more formal with a larger screen and some chairs, so people would feel free to linger. On the other hand, that was precisely the point. People were able to move around, or just stop by is something caught their eye. Having to
reexplain RSS got a little repetitive over the course of the hour and fifteen minutes, but I think that people walked away from the session — no matter how long they stayed — having just enough info to go back and try things out. I hope my wiki page helps them do PD in their own school. As for the Tech To Go Sessions, ideally, I would like to see
them working there with computers in front of them, so they could try it out at the moment. Yet, perhaps there is some value in getting these micro bursts of information about newer literacies and technologies. I
will be interested to see how the conference evaluations reflect people’s experiences with these Tech To Go sessions and to think about how we can shape them for next year.
After browsing books, I was fortunate enough to see Barry Lane heading towards his room with all his gear in tow. After offering a hand to help, and having a quick discussion about when we met in October at the MCTE conference, we were able to walk and talk on the way to his session room. He remembered our conversation in October, reminded me that I needed to send him the podcast (which I finally was able to do
today!), and offered me one of his CDs for helping. When we got to the room with time to spare, he asked if he could interview me for his YouTube channel. I encourage you to watch the video with Corbett Harrison instead!
Video Added 12/5/08
Then, was time for me to sit. Whew…. A session presented by Bill Bass, Melissa Lynn Pomerantz, and Debra Solomon Baker from St. Louis on “Extensions: Using Technology to Extend the English Classroom.” The three of them talked about how they used participatory tools in their classroom, including the use of audio recordings embedded in word docs to give students feedback, a variety of formats for discussion forums, and how to organize your personalized professional development with RSS feeds. It was good to hear Melissa and Debra in particular talk about how very simple uses of technology were having such a profound effect on their teaching.
Later in the afternoon, as PSU was crushing MSU, I was able to ignore the pain of the game by thinking about my third session, “Why Should We Write with a Wiki? Professional Development and the Read/Write Web.” Working with Mary Sawyer and Tim Dewar to frame a session on how pre-service and in-service teachers perceive literacies, I was able to share some of the work of Project WRITE and how teachers engaged in professional learning and collaboration with a wiki. In talking with the two of them, as well as other participants in the session, we were all able to enjoy a thoughtful and engaging close to Saturday. While
Anne Whitney’s Nittany Lions whipped on my Spartans, at least we were able to have a good conversation about how teachers learn digital literacies and we talked about how to continue supporting graduate students in the NWP network.
Saturday night brought a trip down to the San Antonio Market District, and fun night of conversation with RCWP colleagues.
Nacho libre anyone?
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Wow… A “down” day in that I had no presentations to do. Instead, I was able to meet with some colleagues throughout the day to discuss some projects as well as catch a few sessions. One of the more interesting
ones was a panel of British scholars — Julie Blake, Tom Rank, and Tim Shortis — who talked about their work with digitizing texts in the British Library, teaching 21st century literacies to teachers, and understanding the role of txting in our language. All were thought provoking and helped me consider the many ways in which as the nature of literacy continues to change, the ways that we frame the discussions about the change matter as much — if not more — than the changes themselves. The idea that sticks with me most is that we, as educators, can help provide context, in a variety of ways, to the vast bits of knowledge that are out there. The project that the British Library is undertaking to organize and contextualize the texts in their collection is simply mind-blowing.
Also, Kathy Yancey delivered another outstanding address that suggested we reframe the teaching of writing. I can’t even try to capture everything she said, but it was great stuff.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Final day. ACE Workshop. As it has been the past two years, lots of fun to talk with teachers about the use of read/write web tools in the classroom. As always, the sessions were fast-paced and I again talked
about Writing with Wikis. We had fun overwriting each other in Wikispaces, yet it seemed like most participants walked away with some ideas about why and how to use wikis in their classroom. Before we had
to go to lunch, Allen Webb shared his new website, Lit Archives, and talked about a number of ways to engage students in classic literature by harnessing digital versions of those texts and inviting them into virtual worlds.
After eating with my friend Carl Young, I had to catch a cab back to the airport. Finally able to get on wifi for free, I tried to write this blog post but (as you can imagine) ran out of time after checking email and talking with my Michigan colleagues who were about to hop on the plane with me.
So, NWP/NCTE 2008 comes to a close with me writing the bulk of this post (novella?) on the plane heading home towards Detroit. Of all the things that I didn’t do, I feel bad that I didn’t keep up with Twitter via SMS all weekend, as Andrea worked very hard to get that as our networking tool for the weekend. And I missed a lot. A lot. I look forward to reading everyone else’s reflections.
Yet, it was still a good conference. And the talk about technology and newer literacies filled most of the conference presentations and hallway conversations, implicitly or explicitly. I was able to help highlight the work of my colleagues and friends, some who were able to be at the conference and others who were not.
For as much as I did, as many new people as I met and those who I became reacquainted with, I have to say that I am tired. Not looking forward to shoveling snow, although I am looking forward to seeing my kids, my friends, and my family over the holiday weekend.
Happy Thanksgiving to all my students, friends, and colleagues reading this. Thanks for sticking through this post and sharing these reflections, as well as the entire conference, with me.
See you next year in Philly, hopefully with a crew of teachers from our new writing project site.
Evidence-Based Practice in Writing – Drawing on Experimental, Qualitative, and Single Subject Design Research for Answers
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
11:30am – 1:00pm
Room 133F Erickson Hall, Michigan State University
This presentation will examine what we know about effective writing instruction, drawing on three recent reviews of the literature. One of the reviews (Writing Next) was a meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental writing intervention research. Another review was a meta-analysis of single-subject design writing intervention research. The third review was a meta-synthesis of qualitative research conducted with outstanding literacy teachers, designed to identify common practices across studies. Advantages and disadvantages to the use of evidence-based practices in writing will also be explored.
About the Speaker:
Steve Graham is the Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education and Literacy, a chair he shares with Karen R. Harris. His research interests include learning disabilities, writing instruction and writing development, and the development of self-regulation. Graham is the editor of Exceptional Children and the former editor of Contemporary Educational Psychology. He is the co-author of the Handbook of Writing Research, Handbook of Learning Disabilities, Writing Better, and Making the Writing Process Work. In 2001, Graham was elected a fellow of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities. He is the recipient of career research awards from the Council for Exceptional Children and Special Education Research Interest Group in the American Educational Research Association.
And, here are some notes from the session:
Opening quote: “Kids know the most interesting things” – Mark Twain
“It hurt, the way your tongue hurts when you accidentally staple it to the wall.”
Writing is nowhere in terms of the educational reform movement in this country
The things that drive the educational reform movement are reading and math
This is not always bad, as it sometimes results in school practices that are not good
But, we need to make the case that writing is important
1. One of the reasons that people are not paying attention to writing is that there is a general perception that we do not know how to teach writing. Policy makers want evidence, and they want particular kinds of evidence.
We do know that there are some things that work for all students 4-12 and younger
People don’t think that writing is important. So, we have to look at the effects of writing on content area learning. We make the case that writing can be helpful in terms of the STEM skills
Reading gets more play in the literacy discussion. We need to look at the effects of writing on reading. How does writing affect reading?
2. What are the practices going on in elementary and secondary schools
Limitations: survey data that could be rosy, but the data is still not good
ELA teachers are doing less than one extended writing assignment a month
You don’t wan to go into policy making without good research to make recommendations
3. Theoretical framework — from Patricia Alexander from moving from knowledge about discourse and enhancing motivation
What are three primary resources we can draw from?
Professional writers
Unfortunately, the advice can be simplistic and only moves confident writers to expert writers; it doesn’t help other writers
Effective practices from experienced teachers
Talk to effective teachers or observe good teachers in practice and study them
Problem: if I go in looking for one thing, I will likely see it (difficult to separate the wheat from the shaft”
Problem: Donald Graves and the example that works. Yet, there are times when this doesn’t work.
Problem: generalizability. Evidence is often selective.
With scientific studies, we collect evidence, presents findings for all participants, replicability, strength of impact — all this leads to something that should be more trustworthy than insight and experience.
This presentation, thus, will draw on three sources: experimental, single subject, and teacher practice
Other criteria:
Four replications
Converging evidence (the sun, the moon and the stars align)
Recommendations based on higher quality studies are superior
Process writing has very poor research, so you need to be cautious about this
The more studies, the merrier
Effect size:
.8 is large
.5 is moderate
.25 is small, but significant
Writing Next looks at overall quality of writing
Strategy instruction (planning, revising, editing, and regulating the writing process; 20 studies, .82 effect size (particularly helpful for kids who find writing difficult)
Don’t just PEE (post, explain, and expect) students need repeated modeling
For instance, the STOP strategy (Suspend judgment, Take a side, Organize ideas, Plan more as you go)
Teaching Summarization (systematic and explicit teaching of how to summarize texts); 4 studies, ? (missed it) effect size
Teach the six rules of summarization
Peer assistance (working together to plan draft and revise); 7 studies, .75 effect size
Needs to be a structured in a positive way — having students add questions marks and carats in their peers’ papers
Setting product goals (specific goals for the written product to be completed); 5 studies, .70 effect size
Need to tell students what you expect without limiting them
Product goals and revising
Word Processing (using word processing); 18 studies, .55 effect size
Some are short studies, but some are up to a year
Using the technology which is widely available is important, but it is used infrequently in schools or, when it is used, it is only used for final draft/publication
Sentence combining (constructing more complex sentences by combining shorter kernel sentences); 5 studies, .5 effect
Work on this together with students, then invite them to apply it back in their own writing
Process Approach (extended opportunities for writing, student ownership); 21 studies, . 32 effect size
Inviting students to engage in planning and revising is good
Bad news: the effect size is scattered all over the place
Receiving training from NWP is about a .46 effect, and is insignificant if you did not get that training
You can do this in a very poor way, and not get a good effect; this is compatible with a strategy approach that makes the writing more visible
Pre-Writing (have students engage in activities such as brainstorming; 5 studies, .32 effect
STOP strategy, for instance
Inquiry (old research); 5 studies, .32 effect
No pre-test done, so these studies may underestimate the effect size
Example: set a goal, analyze the data, look at specific strategies, and apply what you learned
A student in elementary school looking at conflict on the playground
Study of Models
Examines examples of specific writers and types of text; 6 studies, .25 effect
Model from good readings
Writing as a Tool for Learning (writing in the content areas); small but positive effect
26 studies, but I think that it is more effective in science and math than ELA and social studies based on the effect sizes that we see
Grammar (explicit teaching of grammar); 11 studies, -.32 effect size
Quality of writing is not affected by grammar instruction
What this traditionally looks like is that you give a definition, example, and then is used in decontextualized works
If we expect it, but do not help students use grammar then it will likely not work
Take the kernel sentence: Dog bit mailman
Recommendations for Struggling Writers (teaching handwriting, spelling, and typing to struggling writers — teaching transcription skills towards automaticity), small positive effect
Single Subject Design Recommendations
Explicitly teach students strategies to construct paragraph; strong positive impact
Showing parts of a paragraph to the point that students understand the goals of writing a paragraph
Explicitly teaching students how to capitalize, punctuate, etc. helped
Reinforce positive aspects of students writing — social praise, tangible reinforcement or both as a means to increasing specific writing behaviors (small positive effect)
Traditional means of grading papers doesn’t work — “we get more with honey than we do with vinegar”
Couldn’t draw the summary effect from this, however
Need to move the feedback beyond the specific paper and help the student move forward in his/her writing
Self-monitoring (students asked to count how many errors they made); might be effective for some struggling writers
Individual Teachers
Study exceptional teachers and schools
Practice had to be applied by the majority of schools or teachers
10 Practices that might make a differences (had to occur in four or more studies)
Dedicate time to writing and writing instruction, with writing occuring across the curriculum
Get kids in the game of writing
Increasing writing by itself is not enough, it also needs to be motivating and give kids tools to be effective
Involve students in various forms of writing over time
Treat writing as a process
Keep students engaged by involving them in thoughtful acticvities such as planning compositions
Vary individual, small, and large group instruction
Mode, explain, and provide guided assistance when teaching
Teachers need to relinquish control
Provide just enough supprt so that students can make progress or carry out writing tasks and processes, but encourage students to act in a self-regulated manner as much as possible
Be enthusiastic about writing and create a positive environment where students are constantly encouraged to try hard, believe that the skills and strategies that they are learning will help them write well
Set high expectations
Adapt writing assignments to meet the needs of students
Caveats
We should not order these practices hierarchically in terms of one being more effective thananother
Instead we should order them in a way that we see them working well for us
The database is thin
Just because a practice has been studied, it does not mean that it will be effective for all teachers in all classrooms.
Pay attention and see if it works in your classroom, with your students
Little data on those students who are most at-risk: ELL, learning disabilities, struggling writers
Lack of data on maintenance and generalization
Don’t really know best how best to put all of these things together
Think about trying to integrate some of these ideas as part of an overall approach rather than try to fit it into an existing approach
Teachers’ views on acceptability of these practices will clearly influence their use — this will include the issue of domain specificity
If you don’t accept it as a reasonable practice for you in your classroom it will not work
Just because a practices is effective in a study or was used by an exceptional teacher does not mean that it will always work
Questions
6 traits
Most studies were pre- and post-tests with no control
Look at journal article on Writing Next
6 plus 1 looked pretty good for what was there
In-Service
When we asked ELA, science, and social studies teachers about how well their program taught them to teach writing, 70% said it was inadequate
We also asked about in-service preparation — you personally, school, conferences — ELA said that 70% were adequate, but 30% were inadequate
Most science and other content teachers didn’t feel prepared to do so
Not doing it at pre-service level because most states do not require a course in teaching writing
We have been doing this work for nearly 25 years and we have not delivered our work in terms of learning strategies approach and outreach
We have a distribution problem — we are not providing what we know in pre-service and in-service ed
A lot of this is very complicated, so we did the best practice book to give something for teachers to look at
We need to have support materials showing teachers how to do this — if you can see it, you can do it
My Reflections
In thinking about Dr. Graham’s talk, there are a number of salient points that I want to consider. First, he went over the 11 strategies from Writing Next and, even though there is evidence to show that all these strategies are effective, it is the individual teacher that makes the difference in writing instruction.
Second, he talked about how students can use word processing to write and revise, and that is very effective for their growth as writers; however, most of the opportunities that students have to write with the computer only involve typing in a “final draft” of something else that has been written out beforehand.
Next, he talked about peer editing and how students must be scaffolded into the process of giving feedback; just having them give comments to one another is not enough as they must use the language of writing in that talk.
Finally, he talked about the writing process approach and having an authentic purpose and audience for students should happen more often than what it is. Typically, the audience is only within the classroom walls, and students don’t share beyond their friends. Yet, he described a project in his children’s school in which students shared their work more widely and that it could be a goal for many, although not all of our assignments.
“Writing Transformations: How New Literacies and New Times Invite Us to Rethink Composition”
Literacy is changing, literacy as design
Obstacles: accountability measures and deficit thinking
If we are constantly trying to fill in gaps, we are not moving into the future. Looking at education from a deficit model results in damaging education.
You cannot move toward the future from a deficit model
Spotting deficit thinking
“these kids”
“s/h/they have no language/culture/experience
“culture of poverty”
finger-wagging to parents
Varieties in deficit thinking
Individual ability/genetics
Culture
Poverty
Language
Mass and popular culture
Examples
Paying kids in NYC for grades to “compete” with what they could earn on the street
Motives for teaching that see children as coming from deficient lives
Rather than see these children and what they could do from a deficit model, we enabled them to produce texts that mattered to them and developed new literacy practices.
Reflections:
As Bomer talked, I appreciated his perspective on new literacies as “avoiding the deficit” model of thinking. This adds a new twist to the discussions of new literacies that I have been reading about recently, both because it honors the socio-cultural perspective that NLS has developed over time and also addresses issues about about accountability and assessment by hitting it head on by using the research on deficit thinking to support the idea that approaching literacy in reductive ways really contributes to poor literacy practices.
Last Friday, I was invited to lead a “brown bag” session for my English department’s composition program. Titled “Multiliteracies in Composition,” we focused our pre-reading on an article about a second-year college composition course developed at Michigan Tech called “Revisions.” Details can be found in the following article:
We began by watching the Richard Miller’s presentation: The Future is Now. This presented us with a variety of challenging questions about how we might pursue such a vision of the “new humanities” at CMU, including discussions about professional development, our beliefs about the changing nature of literacy, and how, if at all, a shift in our curriculum would happen in the time frame that Lynch and Wysocki describe from their context.
We then continued in small groups with a jig saw reading, where groups posted 2-3 responses or question in their own page on my wiki. After a watching Wikis in Plain English, they understood the basics of posting and were able to see how using a wiki could allow for multiple groups to post their work and then quickly share it with the class. The conversation continued in a large group discussion, including some emerging questions:
What do students need in terms of literacy in a changing world?
How do multiliteracies relate to technology and communications?
What does the multi-disciplinary approach do for departments? What about specialization?
If everyone talks the same language, do we have our own specialties?
What does this mean for us in terms of the course? Content? Writing?
Faculty-only vs. Graduate Assistants–How is this possible or feasible at our University?
What does this look like across the curriculum? Is it sustainable?
What about assessment? Individual? Groups? Programmatic?
Is there still a need for traditional comp courses? Don’t you still need a first year comp?
What would the writing center need to/be expected to do?
Does this perpetuate a two-tiered society, a Gutenberg in reverse?
How do we support faculty in these collaborations?
Is the resistance about learning to do old things with new technologies or really coming to understand a new paradigm that the new technologies allow?
We ended with Michael Wesch and his students’: A Vision of Students Today, and just in time for a sunny mid-winter drive home. All told, it was a timely and lively discussion for our department, and I appreciated having the opportunity to facilitate the session. Given the release of the 2008 Horizon Report, it seems as though we are constantly reminded that things continue to change. I hope that this session serves as a spark that continues into further conversations about multiliteracies in composition later this semester.
Here is a video from Richard E. Miller, the Chair of the Department of English at Rutgers, explaining his thinking about the shift to a new vision of the humanities and how that vision will be enacted through physical space at the university. It certainly suggests some of the changes that we will have to make in our thinking, especially at the universtiy level.
One particular element of this video that makes it compelling is his idea about the missing piece of the Wikipedia puzzle, and what universities have to offer students as they make their way in a read/write web world.
Inside Higher Ed shares some results from a recent survey of college students about their uses of technology. Among the more interest findings:
Instead, students appear to segment different modes of communication for different purposes. E-mail, Web sites, message boards and Blackboard? Viable ways of connecting with professors and peers. Same for chat, instant messaging, Facebook and text messages? Not necessarily, the authors write, because students may “want to protect these tools’ personal nature.”
This trend reflects what I have been seeing in my classes this fall — many students are used to doing online research, will email me, and participate in Blackboard to the extent that I require it. The other tools for communication are popular amongst them, and I do not “invade” those spaces (for instance, even though I know nearly 100% of my students are on Facebook — because I asked them in class — I have not looked them up or tried to make them my friends).
What I find more compelling though is that many colleges and professors are not responding to the “sea change” (noted later in the article). Our digital natives may be able to use Facebook, but the article notes that using a tool like Google Docs is still seen as innovative for both students and professors. At risk of sounding a little self-congratulatory (but noting that much of what I do in my classroom comes from my colleagues in the NWP), I don’t understand how professors can not be using Google Docs or other read/write web tools. For instance, I have students (some of them at least) submitting papers to me through Google Docs and, later in the semester, will be composing collaboratively written papers in there. None of my students knew about Google Docs at the beginning of the semester, and I hope to have them all proficient at using it by the end.
At any rate, the final note in the article from the report was this:
The report also finds challenges in addressing skills gaps for using spreadsheets and CMS software, highlighting the need for colleges to provide instructional technology to bring students up to speed.
Indeed, this skills gap needs to be addressed in all classes, not just a Computers 101. We need to continue to offer contextualized and useful technology learning. For digital writers, at a minimum, that should include tasks like blogging, collaborative word processing, creating and collaborating in a wiki, tagging, social bookmarking, online citation managers, composing multimedia including video and audio, and giving and getting feedback in multiple formats (written and aural). I look forward to continuing to teach these skills in my courses and hope that the ECAR survey, like the annual Horizon Report, continues to push us in that direction.
A media professor has begun teaching a class on YouTube. Not so unusual that this would happen, given the fact that YouTube has been around for awhile now. In fact, it is kind of cool that it is finally happening.
What I have found more interesting is that as I have been catching up on my RSS reading, I see that two different sources are reporting it in slightly different, yet noticeable ways:
You’d expect that a professor teaching a class on and about YouTube would be a huge booster of the site. But not Juhasz. She says she is “underwhelmed” and “unsatisfied” by much of the content, which she describes as spoofs of pop culture references that she just doesn’t understand.
Juhasz’s main critique of the site is its architecture. Academics strive to make connections across disciplines, she says, but YouTube makes it difficult to provide context (often in the form of links), and to carry on complex conversations beyond the small space given for comments below the video.
Still, as a professor of media studies, she says ignoring the site is impossible. Instead, she wants students to draw their own conclusions after spending a semester working entirely within the framework and constraints of YouTube. She wants them to think about cultural references, what makes a great work of art and how to define a truly democratic medium. Is YouTube the latter? Juhasz says no — in large part because of its corporate ownership.
An academic take, to be sure. But also a balanced one. Here is the take from my local paper:
Pitzer College this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.
Class lessons also are posted and students are encouraged to post videos. One class member, for instance, posted a 1:36-minute video of himself juggling.
Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor at the liberal arts college, said she was “underwhelmed” by the content on YouTube but set up the course, “Learning from YouTube,” to explore the role of the popular site.
So, what’s better for students? “A dream come true?” Or, “working entirely within the framework and constraints of YouTube?”
The different approaches don’t surprise me, as media has always shown its biases based on the publication, the audience, and the goals the editors have in relation to the two. As I saw the two drastically different introductions to this story from the two publications, it made me doubly aware of how critical media studies can be portrayed in the popular media.
And, given Michigan’s budgetary crisis this fall, how teaching anything beyond the “basics” could be up for criticism (much like other topics such as film, gender studies, and the like have been in the past) make me wonder:
Will we be able to design courses in digital writing that aren’t seen as frivolous?
Do students see digital writing as a kind of fun add-on to (or replacement for) the types of writing that we expect in traditional academic settings?
Will composition classes be able to invite students to create digital videos as a means of argumentative writing, or will people only worry more because some students are posting clips of themselves juggling (which could have been a legitimate part of the professor’s first “getting-to-know-you and learn-how-to-post-to-YouTube type of assignment)?
This is an interesting pair of articles that I might share with my students next week, since our next assignment is a critical text analysis (and I have yet to share anything on YouTube…).
Digital Planet, and excellent program that is on the top of my podcast playlist each week (subscribe to it here), offers us some insights from Google about the future of their work with education:
GOOGLE SCHOOL
Could Google expand its empire into education as well?
Google is expanding into many fields such as advertising, mapping and television. But recently, the search giant’s head of research, Peter Norvig, also talked about plans to educate children.
Speaking at the Learning Technology for the Social Network Generation conference Peter Norvig proposed setting children free to develop their own learning, with a teacher taking on the role of assessor at the end of the project.
Google see their search engine as the primary search for this new free self education, but there are warnings about the use of unmoderated and undirected searches across the internet.
This couldn’t have popped into my podcast playlist at a more opportune time. As I have begun teaching at CMU this fall, I have been relying heavily on Google’s tools for running my classes, especially my Intermediate Writing course. (Why they don’t have their reader and notebook listed on that page, I don’t know).
At any rate, in thinking about how my course is structured and what I hope for students to learn, I ended up drawing a concept map of the course and then created two screencasts: one describes my overall vision for what they will do and learn in the course while the other demonstrates how a particular student interested in a topic (I chose marketing as an example) might do his/her work in the course.
This whole process — taken in context of the Google interview — has been an engaging intellectual exercise and makes me think that I should have done a course map at the beginning. Since I am asking them to both use technology and examine its uses at the same time we are writing and examining how writers write, I think that some of their concerns, questions, and confusions are warranted. I hope that this diagram, as well as my screencasts, help them think through the possibilities for the course. Some that I am think of, in relation to Google tools, are:
To use Blogger to post critical responses as well as give and get feedback on their responses
To use Google Docs to share drafts with me and peers; to develop parts of their final group project
To use Google Notebook as a way for me to comment on their blogs in a private space and keep a running list of comments
To use Google Notebook as a way to document their own research
To use Google Scholar to find articles for their research
To use Google Reader to identify blogs, news sites, and Google news alerts about their topics
Of course, there are tools other than Google’s that we will be using, like Wikispaces, del.icio.us, and Zotero, but this is where my thinking is at right now for the beginning of the semester. I am hoping that this multiliteracies approach to reading, researching, and writing will help scaffold students into writing within their disciplines as well as learn how to use digital tools for productive purposes. I feel that they are starting to understand what I mean when I say that I define “composition” broadly, and all the groups are developing some great topics (check out their brainstorming from our wiki homepage).
I look forward to hearing what they think about the course map, screen casts, and this Google interview.
Things have been absolutely crazy the past two weeks, but that has been good for me especially as I get back in the swing of teaching. As I begin the semester, there are a few things that I’ve been thinking about that I want to capture here and come back to think about more later.
First, in my writing class, the students have pretty much jumped up to each new technology that we try. On the first day of class, we began a wiki and I had students post some intro material there. This week, we created Google accounts and got set up with Blogger and Google Reader. All this is leading them to create their own research agendas, affinity groups for a multimodal presentation, and to become writers in their professions in the 21st century. Based on their initial surveys, there was a wide range of tech skills, and they are willing to help one another in the classroom, so that is good. Based on what I have seen, this will be a very “school 2.0” type of experience for them.
Second, in my methods class, we began a wiki, too. Unlike my writing class in which things are organized more thematically and students will have some choice about the types of writing that they do, I have to organize this class around a slightly more structured curriculum. That said, there is still lots of room for flexibility and I will be inviting them to do some digital composition as well. They, like the writing class, were a bit apprehensive at first about writing on the wiki, but in an activity tonight, they were doing quite well. In fact, one student synthesized a few lists of responses from separate groups on one page without being asked (as we learned last week that overwriting can be a problem). I also showed them Google Docs, and some seemed intrigued. So, we might go in that direction a bit, too.
All of this is just to say that I have been reminded again and again about taking things in slow, manageable chunks. One student half-joked that she was thinking about dropping the writing course after the first day (she didn’t, thank goodness, and did well today setting up her blog). It reminds me that some students know quite a bit about this and can help others. And, for everyone, it is nice to have reminders and tutorials; thus, I am going to look for tutorials on YouTube for everything that we do so they can go back to it later to be reminded (or, perhaps, I will make my own with Jing).
At any rate, this has me very excited about the semester and the fact that students are taking to the school 2.0 kind of learning. I appreciate all the podcasts, blog postings, and one-on-one coaching that my colleagues have provided to me so I can be at this point — and look forward to sharing thoughts back here. More to come as the semester progresses.
Apologies in advance for what will be a long post here, as my “reflection in action” during the conference consisted more of trying to find free wifi and navigating the Riverwalk than it did of actually having time to sit down and think. I tried to break my thinking up by day, for what that’s worth, and hope that these thoughts are useful for all my readers, especially all my colleagues who were unable to attend.
My thoughts on the Tech To Go session are mixed, but all in a good way. On the one hand, I wanted to have it be a little more formal with a larger screen and some chairs, so people would feel free to linger. On the other hand, that was precisely the point. People were able to move around, or just stop by is something caught their eye. Having to