Online Learning – Page 5 – Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Imagining a New Course: Our Digital Selves

ipad-605439_960_720 — Public Domain Image from FirmBee on Pixabay

One of my relaxing and still intellectually engaging tasks for this holiday break is to write a proposal for an honors course at CMU. Designed as a first-year seminar for freshman honors students to get them engaged in critical thinking, inquiry, and sustained writing practices, each seminar must tackle a major issue relevant to students’ lives. I am proposing a class entitled “Our Digital Selves: Building and Blending Our Personal, Professional, and Practical Digital Identities.” Here are the details, and I would definitely be interested in getting feedback from other educators about what topics, terminology, and technology I might explore with my students. If the proposal is accepted, I would teach the course in the fall of 2017.

Our Digital Selves: Building and Blending Our Personal, Professional, and Practical Digital Identities

Without question, we live, work, and play in a digital world. Though a divide still exists in terms of skills and access across demographics, it is reasonable to argue that the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices connected to the Internet as well as broadband in our homes, schools, libraries, and workplaces means that all of us – especially young people coming of age in the present moment – are now blending our personal, professional, and practical digital identities across multiple networks and with a variety of tools. However, the ability to upload a picture or post on one’s timeline does not, in and of itself, assure us each a place in digital segments of academia, the workplace, or civic life. In fact, a recent Rasmussen College survey showed that 37% of millennial students see the internet as “scary” and are not confident in their digital literacy skills. This first year seminar will challenge students to critically examine what it means to lead a digital life – personally and academically – and to rethink our understanding of what it means to be mindful, productive, and responsible users of technology.

This seminar would be designed with both face-to-face and hybrid components.

In the face-to-face sections of class, we would be engaged in small- and whole-group conversations about articles, chapters, books, videos, and other pieces of scholarship related to digital identity; we would also be examining case studies of digital literacy practices considering current professional standards (such as the ACRL Information Literacy Framework); and, ultimately, we would be producing students’ initial online portfolio using a social networking tool such as About.me or LinkedIn.
In the hybrid/online sections of class, we would be exploring a variety of digital tools to help students develop personal, professional, and academic skills including, for instance: shared document collaboration (Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365), bibliographic management (Zotero, Mendely, Endnote), presentation and publication (Infogr.am, Atavist, Adobe Creative Suite), and workplace communication (Slack, Yammer). We might also involve students from outside of CMU as part of our inquiry.
Across both the face-to-face and hybrid meetings, we would also be using our time to reflect upon the experience of being engaged in these various exercises with specific tools. In short, we would be metacognitive, critically thinking about our use of digital devices and social practices.

I welcome thoughts, comments, and questions… as well as knowing if anyone else with students from upper elementary school through graduate school would be interested in collaborating on this course to make it an open, immersive experience for everyone involved. If it gets accepted, I will put the call out there again in the spring, but I would be happy to hear from interested educators at any point.

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Conversation about Connected Reading on LitBit Podcast

Many thanks to Brooke Cunningham, creator of the LitBit podcast and a doctoral student in the University of Tennessee PhD in young adult literature program, for inviting Kristen Turner and me to share our thoughts on Connected Reading with her listeners. Please listen to and share the episode!

Posting, Probing, and Reflecting on Conversations with NowComment

now-comment-screenshot — Screenshot of my class’s discussion with Now Comment

So, I know I’m a little bit late to the web, image, and video annotation phenomenon that’s taken place over the last few years. I’ve talked a little bit about it in some of the pieces that I’ve written on Connected Reading, but I haven’t really been an avid user simply because it couldn’t quite figure out ways to integrate it fully into the courses I was teaching. This fall, however, I jumped in feet first and the particular tool that I have chosen to invest my (and my students’) time in is NowComment.

I was made aware of the impending changes to NowComment’s text-only to image and video annotation features earlier this year when Dan Doernberg was featured on the Teachers Teaching Teachers weekly webcast (below). I very much appreciate – especially this week – Dan’s mission as founder of Fairness.com:

“Beginning with the 2008 Election, our focus shifted to improving some of the fundamental “cultural infrastructure” that makes it far too easy for the powerful to take advantage of the less powerful. NowComment®, a software tool that facilitates in-depth, intellectually honest discussion of complex documents, is the first of several such projects.”

As a teacher of writing and educational technology, I have been quite impressed with the features that NowComment offers. In addition to a user-friendly interface, NowComment’s ability for me to look back through threaded discussions and to sort my students comments individually has been immeasurably helpful. As I think about designing the discussion task, looking for ways to optimize student learning, I know that I will be able to do this kind of advanced sorting when I prepare to evaluate their participation.

And, for me, this is the crux of online (or face-to-face) commenting/annotation. We want to invite and encourage conversation, not just comments. I have shared with my masters students (mostly teachers and professional educators in other fields) a few additional resources to help them move the conversations forward, and this is what I am playing with more and more each week. For instance:

In forming their initial response to the readings/viewings for the week, I am asking the teachers to use Terry Heick’s “19 Reading Response Questions For Self-Guided Response.”
As they engage with others, I ask them to consider the National School Reform Faculty’s “Probing Questions” protocol as they push their classmates’ thinking.
Finally, as they reflect each week, I am asking them to pull specific examples from the conversation on NowComment into their discussion board postings (in Blackboard).

And this is just the start of my thinking.

I’m sure that there are other all even more robust ways that I can blend thoughtful pedagogical approaches to discussion with the numerous tools that NowComment offers. I’ve shared this tool with a few other faculty members, and I’m thinking about ways that I can integrate it more fully into future courses and professional development that I offer. I wonder:

How else are we thoughtfully connecting the teaching moves of conversation with technologies for annotation?
In what ways we help our students use these tools to “listen,” and not just annotate, deeply and empathetically?
How can the conversations that happen around documents then transfer into deeper, more substantial learning through additional writing and reflection?

These are the questions that continue to drive me forward as I watch my students post, probe, and reflects using NowComment this semester.

Rethinking Scientific Argument with StoryMaps JS

This past week, I was able to cap off a summer whirlwind of PD at CMU’s Biological Station, facilitating what we are calling our first Beaver Island Institute. The six-day event brought together middle school science and ELA teachers for an opportunity to engage in scientific inquiry, explore argument writing in science, and understand aspects of disciplinary literacy. I was fortunate enough to work with two other facilitators, one graduate student, and 16 teachers as they began to develop units of study that connect the Next Generation Science Standards, the Common Core Literacy Standards, and the ISTE Technology Standards. Our main focus was on thinking about how students can pose questions, gather data, analyze that data and refine it into useful evidence, and then make scientific arguments.

Among the many great opportunities that happened, we explored three technologies to support digital writing: infographics (using Piktochart), graphic designs (using Canva), and something new (for me), a tool called StoryMap JS (not to be confused with Story Maps or MapStory, though those both look interesting, too) as a tool for creating presentations that blend map coordinates, images, videos, and text into a coherent “story map” that, indeed, has the map at the center of the story. StoryMapJS is open source, and many news organizations have used it to tell visual stories.

A sample of existing maps shows a variety of ways that users have imagined maps, from the Washington Post tracking the growth of ISIS to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s map of craft breweries in Wisconsin.

As you will see in the sample Story Map that I created below, the cover/title slide is a map that contains all the subsequent points on the map. If you made a story map that was as small as one block in a town, it would zoom in that close; similarly, you could have multiple points represented all over the world with a much wider map in the opening.

The additional slides in the presentation included a space for entering an additional location, uploading (or linking to) an image, and also entering some text. In this space, students could write just about anything — a narrative that moves characters from one location to the next, a poem that describes the location, an informational piece that describes the cultural or scientific value of a particular location, or even evidence for a longer argument (as we discussed this week). The story map, then, can be shared and embedded.

One additional tool that we used to help identify and, quite literally, pinpoint locations was GaiaGPS. Using their map tool, you can search for points of interest, zoom in and out to find other locations, and even drop pins to get exact GPS locations. I also learned from one of the participants that you can take GPS coordinates out of a Google Map, as seen in the close up of the URL bar below.

Close-Up of a Google Map Address Showing GPS Coordinates

One idea that I was imagining was that students could, while out taking pictures and videos of a space, be sure to record their location with GPS coordinates (or enable location services in the mobile app) and then have those exact spots. They could create walking tours of their communities, of natural areas, of historical sites, or — as one participant shared with me this week — they could capitalize on the Pokemon Go craze and make a series of geocaches for others to discover… or historical markers tagged with a QR code or Aurasma augmented reality.

This entire week has been valuable for me in many ways, especially as I was invited to think about connections between science and literacy. My hope is that the teachers who were involved in the institute will carry many new ideas back to their classroom this fall and, in turn, engage their own students in scientific inquiry and building arguments with evidence, evidence that they themselves have collected and analyzed.

StoryMap JS, with the opportunities it affords, could be one innovative platform for students to then share their work. Here is just a brief sample of one story map that I created as a model for the teachers.

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Feature in ACI Author Spotlight

Thank you to ACI Information Group’s Traci Hector for featuring me in their Author Spotlight this month. Also, my profile on ACI is available here.

As I continue to move forward in my career, I need to think about the ways in which sites like ACI, ORCID, and others work, I am curious to know more about the advantages and disadvantages of such systems. These systems appear to create a public profile for a scholar that then allow users to then follow links into official databases.

On the other hand, there are sites like Academi.edu and ResearchGate, which have received some criticisms such as this from the Chronicle’s Vitae blog and this one from The Scholarly Kitchen. The main point is that they ask scholars to upload PDFs of their work (sometimes without appropriate copyright permissions) and then they connect those articles with other analytics for ads.

Then, there are my LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Klout and (seemingly) countless other profiles.

So, each year around this time when I have to update my CV and enter my own work into CMU’s faculty records database (we use a site called OFIS), I wonder if there isn’t a better (more efficient, more connected, more useful, more public, more open…) way to do this work. It leaves me with lots of questions:

What does it mean to be a public intellectual today?
“Where” is “public?” Also, “how,” “when,” and “what” is public? To whom?
Should I just focus my energy on one of these systems/sites? Or, do I need to keep doing more with each?
What does this all mean for open education?

At any rate, I have a profile in ACI, and a featured article. As always, please check it out and let me know what you think.

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Conversation about Research Writing Rewired on NWP Radio

Last night, my friend, colleague, and co-author — Dawn Reed — and I were featured on the National Writing Project’s weekly podcast, NWP Radio. Enjoy this episode in which we discuss the interwoven themes of reading, writing, and technology through a conversation about our book, Research Writing Rewired.

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Tech Risks and Rewards During a Closing Keynote

Yesterday, I was invited to deliver the closing keynote for CMU’s Great Lakes Conference on Teaching and Learning. It was the 9th annual event and, oddly enough, also the end of my ninth academic year here at CMU… and I had never attended before. So, it was a great combination of a familiar audience filled with many colleagues from CMU and other institutions in Michigan while, at the same time, a new venue for me to present because most of my work with higher ed colleagues comes in the form of smaller workshops, not keynote addresses.

Moreover, I was trying to summarize and synthesize ideas from as many of the other conference sessions as possible building on the theme of Engaging All Learners in Today’s “Classroom,” with the scare quotes intentionally placed around that word. Knowing that the classroom — even in fairly traditional, face-to-face settings — involves so much more than just the time you have with students at one moment, in one setting, I wanted to show how a variety of technologies could be used to enhance literacy instruction. So, before the presentation even began, there was a handout on their tables explaining a bit about what we would be doing.

Thus, I built my presentation using Nearpod, and had hoped that my 100+ colleagues would all be able to use it. This was a risk for me, being generally new to Nearpod and having never used it in a keynote. So, as I launched in, the technology gremlins took over. In that moment, I quickly found out that my “gold” account status only allowed 50 participants. It was a technical limitation that I hadn’t even thought about before hand, but certainly should have given similar limitations with other tools like Poll Everywhere.

Still, we were able to soldier on — and I had prepared for some technical difficulties by providing short link URLs to different online activities such as a discussion using Padlet for a visual literacy exercise and a critical thinking activity with Google Docs. I also paused periodically throughout the presentation to remind my colleagues that these technologies can provide us and our students with unique opportunities for sharing and collaborating, but ink and paper can also work just fine as we work to build their skills with disciplinary literacies.

On the whole, I felt as if the audience gave off a good vibe and — despite some technical difficulties — the combination of literacy-based activities with relatively easy-to-use technologies worked well. My fear was that it would be too much, too overwhelming. And, while I could see and hear that concern from some audience members, it seemed as though many people were able to participate. One person commented on the fact that it was good I had the shortened URLs available as a backup.

So, I will continue to take risks with technology. Given that there were many of my CMU colleagues in the audience, I wanted them to see that even the tech experts sometimes try and fail, and then try again. Also, with many of our DET students there, I wanted them to know that I was practicing what I had been teaching all semester long in EDU 807, making an attempt to model creative technology use with practical, pedagogical skills. I am glad that I took the risk, and I hope that the audience felt the same.

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Conversation with NCTE Colleagues for Digital Learning Day

As we near Digital Learning Day 2016, coming up this Wednesday, I was fortunate enough to be invited by NCTE to speak with Executive Director Emily Kirkpatrick and my colleagues Bill Bass, Franki Sibberson, and Kristen Turner.

Though I am grateful that we are turning our national attention to digital learning on this day, I still have some reservations about DLDay, first expressed in 2013. I remind my colleagues that digital learning is about more than just what Doug Belshaw calls “elegant consumption.” We need to be even more mindful of this fact now that the standardized assessments created by SBAC and PARCC are being used widely.

At any rate, please enjoy viewing this brief and timely conversation as much as I enjoyed participating in it.

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(New) Pathways to Leadership

Photo from Flickr — Some rights reserved by Infomastern

The past two days (and into tomorrow), I’ve had the good fortune to be in Austin, TX, amongst a group of dedicated National Writing Project colleagues. As with all NWP events, it has been intellectually challenging and emotionally rewarding, inviting us to think about what it means for us — as site leaders who have each traveled our own unique path to this position — to think about new ways that we can support teachers in our post-NCLB/RTTT world (which also happened to defund the NWP).

We are at the point in the retreat where we have been asked to reflect on two days of conversations, brainstorming sessions, interactive panel discussions, tweeting, post-it noting, gallery walking, and, of course, eating. While there are many themes to reflect upon, I want to zero in on two that made their way to my post it notes this afternoon: effective models for online professional development and recruiting and supporting teachers as they grow into leadership roles.

For the first component, it is fortuitous that I am teaching my first online doctoral course — EDU 807, “Learning Tools in Education Technology” — and that has kicked off this week while I am here at the retreat. There are multiple tensions that I feel need to be balanced:

The “magic” that happens in the summer institute being face-to-face vs. the kinds of alternative experiences we can offer online.
The pervading idea that we can “deliver” a great deal of “content” through online courses/PD vs. the kinds of participation and growth that can happen online.
The dizzying array of ed tech tools that we could employ vs. the values we hold dear about teaching, learning, and the NWP core beliefs.
The balance between teaching writing (alphabetic text, academic conventions) vs. digital writing with multiple forms of media.
The fine line between creating and then offering resources and experiences in a free, open source manner vs. the traditional university ideas about ownership and intellectual property.

There are more, to be sure, but these are the few that have come to mind today.

The second major idea that is on my mind comes in the form of how we can continue supporting teachers as they grow into leadership roles, assuming that we are able to find and develop these teachers in the first place. It is no accident that the NWP model has been compared to minor league baseball’s “farm system.” Noticing and inviting teachers who showed promise as leaders was (and still is) one of the main goals of our work. The challenge is that we don’t have the immersive summer institute experience (or, at the very least, not the same system that we used to have).

Additionally, in many states, teachers are no longer rewarded — in prestige or with pay — to be truly outstanding in the sense that they actively seek out professional learning above and beyond the basics offered in their districts. For instance, in Michigan as in many other states, it is now possible for teachers to get their certificates renewed using “district sponsored” PD hours. Teachers will not be recognized or rewarded for doing more. One teacher with whom I have worked extensively, for instance, doesn’t even share info with department members about the presentations at professional conferences or publications on which we have collaborated. Neither the incentive structure in her school nor the culture of professionalism in the school invites it.

In short, my mind is full, but I admit that my heart is heavy.

This is challenging work and — while I am not afraid to tackle it — I am afraid that, despite our best efforts, we are going to lose some of the magic that is the life-changing NWP experience (with or without summer institutes). This is not to say that we can’t continue to do good work, to reach out to new teachers, and to develop exciting, enriching programs. We have already. We will in the future.

It’s just to say that the “new” pathways to leadership are going to continue to be difficult for us, as existing leaders to forge, and for the next generation of leaders to find. I know we will continue, yet I am anxious to figure out exactly how we will do so.

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(A)Syncronicty and Online Learning

While the semester officially starts tomorrow, I had scheduled an online session with my EDU 807 students tonight via Zoom as a kick-off to the semester. As it happens, this first week of class also coincides with a trip to Austin for a meeting of the National Writing Project for the “New Pathways to Leadership” retreat. So, when I originally sent out a call to the doctoral students in the course to plan for the best time for meeting, I knew that it would be a challenge to get a mutually agreeable time in early this week, preferably Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday, so I had picked tonight when I new.

Travel plans and Mother Nature didn’t cooperate,

One of the values I know that many teachers hold dear is the actual moment of educating — bringing forth new ideas, forging connections, asking questions — and that is, no doubt, difficult to do in an online environment. At best, we aim to do so with the occasional synchronous online event (like the webcast I had planned for tonight), sometimes simply through chat. More often than not, however, it seems that online learning comes in the form of “content” to be “delivered” by a teacher and, subsequently, “mastered” by a student. Either way, the online experience seems less than optimal, though I admit that I am fairly new to fully online teaching.

So, in my efforts to maintain consistency with the goals and aspirations of our doctoral program — and because those goals and aspirations such as a personalized experience, thoughtful relationships with peers and the instructor, and (to the extent possible) flexible models for participation — I wanted to host bi-weekly, whole-class conversations to review the main ideas of the module, have groups report out on their projects, and otherwise build and maintain a community. Even with this goal in mind, I know that I must be aware of the context that my students find themselves in as working adults, spread across time zones, so watching a recorded version of the session is always an option.

I know that this balance has been difficult for anyone teaching an online course — whether 20 students, 200, or in the case of some MOOCs, 2000 or more— yet it seems integral to the learning process. Even last fall when I taught an online writing course that was designed by someone else, when I saw no live interaction between teacher and student in the form of conferences scheduled in the semester, I made time. Even a 15-20 minute conversation with my writers made a big difference in their work, probably more than had I just written 15-20 minutes worth of comments on their papers and sent them back via email.

At any rate, syncronicity escaped me today. Screencasts, such as the one I was able to hack together while stranded in an airport on a weather delay, don’t seem to be a good substitution. And, even if it was a viable option, I simply can’t image that I would have recorded this screencast as “content” that could be made available in the course. I tried to personalize it with a bit of humor, poking a bit of fun at myself and the situation as a way to build rapport with my students.

Interestingly, I was planning to share the oft-cited French postcard above during my talk with them. Noting that it offered a vision of 21st century education from the turn of of the twentieth, it is worth seeing what the artists and futurists got right (and, of course, what they got wrong). While I was not just jamming whole books worth of information into my students’ heads today — and we will use collaborative conversations tools like NowComment and Acclaim later this week — it does echo some of the major concerns that those who resist technology can call on: isolation, memorization, and lack of authentic learning tasks.

My hope and expectation is to be more interactive as the semester wears on and, for that, I appreciate the flexibility that online learning offers.

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