Category: Writing

Naming and Knowledge-Making

This recent article from eSchool News caught my attention and gave me pause to think about the course I am designing for the fall, ENG 460.

Top News – Google unveils online reference tool

For better or worse, Wikipedia–the online reference site that lets anyone add to its ever-growing body of knowledge–has changed the nature of internet research. Now Google is taking the wraps off a free internet encyclopedia of its own, designed to give people a chance to show off–and profit from–their expertise on any topic.

The service, dubbed “knol” in reference to a unit of knowledge, had been limited to an invitation-only audience of contributors and readers for the past seven months.

Now anyone with a Google login will be able to submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed through the internet search leader’s marketing system. The contributing author and Google will share any revenue generated from the ads, which are supposed to be related to the topic covered in the knol.

My interest here is in trying to figure out what value “naming” the author of a “knol” has in comparison to the “anonymous collaborators” that compose Wikipedia entries. I am not so much interested in talking about the authority question, as the one knol that I read on toilet training (a topic of conversation in my house right now!) seemed to be authoritative — and it cited sources — but I couldn’t figure out anything about the author. Also, the main author can open up a knol to collaborators, but not just anyone can chime in. It seems like you retain copyright, too. Finally, one of the stated purposes of the project is to get different people posting knols on the same topic, so having the one, authoritative knol is not necessarily going to happen.

Oh, and it looks like you will eventually be able to serve Google ads on your knol to, I assume, make money.

So, I wonder what this new form of knowledge production will do to the idea of open content. People are free to spend their time and energy wherever they want, be it Wikipedia, Knol, or some other online community. But, I wonder what this idea of sharing one’s knowledge by authoring a knol will do for authors, readers, scholars, and others. By “naming” the author, and being able to verify their credentials, will we feel better about the information presented? Or, does the process that a Wikipedia article goes through still provide more of a peer review process that checks facts and clarifies ideas?

It will be interesting to see how Knol unfolds in the next few months. I may make it part of my students’ final project — post a knol on your topic of independent study. We’ll see how they react to that idea…

CMU Podcast Interview on Technology Literacy

Earlier this month, one of my students, Lynette Seitz, and I were interviewed by Heather Smith, CMU’s Assistant Director of Media Relations about technology literacy and our work in ENG 315 this semester.

I appreciate her invitation to record this podcast and it was wonderful to have Lynette’s voice in there, too, as a pre-service teacher who is thinking about incorporating digital writing into her classroom.

You can get the podcast through CMU’s channel in iTunes.

Notes from Steve Graham’s “Evidence-Based Practice in Writing”

Another great session this week, this time with one of the co-authors of the Writing Next report: Steve Graham.

Here is an overview from the MSU LARC site:

Steve Graham, Vanderbilt University

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
    • Now, STEM – science, technology, engineering/economics,math
    • Why is writing out in the cold?
      • 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.


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Notes from Margaret Hedstrom’s “The Future of Networked Knowledge”

Notes from Margaret Hedstrom’s “The Future of Networked Knowledge”

Overview Announcement:

Dr. Hedstrom is an archivist who is on the faculty of the School of Information at U of M. Her research interest is digital information. She has done some interesting cross cultural empirical research on user response to various methods of archiving digital files. (e.g. “The Old Version Flickers More:” Digital Preservation from the User Perspective. American Archivist http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/dig-pres_users-perspective.pdf) Not just ease of use but also reliability of stored electronic files.

She is also a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. (Their report available at http://er.lib.msu.edu/item.cfm?item=050123)

Notes from the session:

  • Intro
    • Recent feature story from NYT on archiving digital materials
    • We are trying to build networks, facilities, and human capital that takes advantage of the burgeoning world of digital information
    • There are archival questions in every discipline, problems that we encounter in humanities and social sciences, as well as other sciences
    • Today’s talk will be to reflect back on the ACLS Commission’s thoughts on infrastructure for education and the humanities
    • What is the vision and potential of this, as well as the challenges that we experience on a daily basis and others that we can anticipate; then discuss some paths that we can use to move towards this vision
  • The Vision
    • The potential for cyber infrastructure allows for transformative research that were not possible for people to address in the past as well as open scholarship
      • This is the big goal for research cyber infrastrucure
    • Looking from the humanities and social science perspective at a report from science and engineering report on cyber infrastructure
      • What could we do if we had massive amounts of digital data, easy-to-use analytical tools, and networks of repositories, and well-trained people to use it?
    • There must be money out there for the scientists, and the humanists could ride on their coat tails, right? Well… it turns out that when you talk to scientists there are problems with funding for research, and competition is intense, too.
      • Many of us from outside of these science communities think that they are networked and forward-thinking, but there are many questions about what makes legitimate science, peer review, qualifications of researchers, etc.
  • More thoughts on the vision
    • What do we mean by infrastructure?
      • It is about the protocols for moving data, for sure
      • But, it is also about the people who know how to approach these new resources
        • Archivists who are getting data into shape so others can use it
          • There is a lot of technical work in adding metadata that goes unnoticed and, consequently, is different from what has been done in the physical world
        • To take advantage of this potential, we need to learn how to teach and research in different ways, and these are the bigger stumbling blocks that we need to get over
  • There are new ways of addressing research that are happening in a parallel with a move towards interdisciplinarity
    • How do you take ideas that have been historically separated by institutional boundaries that are now coming back together again in a digital convergence?
    • How does an interest in cyber-enabled learning happen in conjunction with this? Is there a dissastisfaction with the compartmentalized visions of scholarship?
    • A goal for cyber infrastructure shifts your way of thinking about research and looking at problems that allows for a new way to think about problems.
  • What would “big” humanities (transformative research) mean?
    • Because of the way that humanities research has been done in the past (single investigator, deep problem, specific set of data resources) — the problems have been scaled down to fit within the scope of work for one human being.
    • Now, we can scale the work across a team of people and apply knowledge to much bigger questions
    • Changing the culture is partly a generational change and partly thinking about not trying to convince those who do not want to change their ideas.
    • Some of the big issues with the humanities is that the early attempts to do quantitative research didn’t fit in with the paradigm of what people were trying to look at.
      • What has happened since then is that the kind of resources available to, say, historians, are richer and more vast.
        • You can get census data, yes, but you can also get images, primary texts, and other items more easily
      • UM and Google’s library project — how does a historian go about mining that data?
  • Resistance
    • You can enable other kinds of cyber science, but don’t take away from my current budget.
    • Is the work empirical? Does it have rigorous tests of validity? What happens when you triangulate it with other kinds of research?
  • Openness in Scholarship
    • Open in both the sense that it is making contributions to research as well as have access to the results
      • The raw materials for the research (documents, data, and even people) are networked and widely accessible
        • In this area, she gives librarians lots of credit for moving forward in this area
        • There are formidable monetary and intellectual property issues to overcome here, though
      • Research becomes much more collaborative
        • It doesn’t mean that the idea of the lone investigator goes out the window
        • Expertise is shared, however, and scholarship is open to new audiences and perspectives
          • Universities have done a disservice by trying to have “quality” through exclusivity
          • What is the line between a free-for-all and a very rich dialogue about the research questions we are trying to pursue?
        • Also, could we engage younger people with a degree of fun? Have we dismissed something that people might find engaging by dismissing it as frivolous?

Challenges

  • Where do you start with all of this?
    • There is a complex set of interdependent variables here.
      • How do we do research without a critical mass of resources and tools?
    • There have been some areas in the humanities where things have changed.
      • For instance, in the classics, you find many early adopters because the primary resources are finite (there are only so many original Greek texts) and you can get it online; it is the base of data that everyone draws there conclusions from the ancient world
      • On the other hand, what happens when you look at 20th century history and the endless amounts of content that are out there?
      • What happens when all the volumes in the world are digitized? Of all the primary sources out there, we only have so much money to digitize though…
        • What do we bring out that is trapped?
      • Within the disciplines, there is lots of room for advice from scholars on this
        • Someday, can we help make decisions about what is important in the field and what needs to be digitized?
        • Can we help develop the analytical tools to look at the data?
          • Can we do massive text mining?
          • Visualizations?
        • What about stimulating the demand for this new kind of scholarship?
          • Who wants to take a risk as a young scholar when it could fall flat on deaf ears or it could be the greatest thing since sliced bread?
          • Is there an in-between space that we can translate the goals of that vision on a reasonable scale?
        • Where does the money come from?
          • Most of the physical infrastructure in this country came in the early part of this century. The point is that we do no, as a country, invest in maintaining infrastructure. Universities do a little better at this, but there is more to do to mobilize these resources.

          How do we build an ethos of openness and the public good, when the culture and legal structure locks data up and attaches ownership to them?

  • Social and cultural challenges
    • Institutional Roles
      • Incentives and rewards for scholars who take the risk to do research in these new ways
      • There are challenges to the ways of doing this work
        • Conservative, traditional modes of funding
        • Finding others to collaborate with
        • Tenure and what counts as legitimate contributions to scholarship
      • These are all ways of thinking in institutions that are deeply held and may not be antithetical to these newer notions, but certainly don’t jive with them either
        • Everyone’s work will change as a consequence of this shift
      • The role of the brick and mortar university will still attract students from a variety of backgrounds and these interactions will not go away
        • But, what is it that distinguishes one place from another, especially with this notion of openness?
        • What are universities doing to attract faculty?
        • What physical resources does the university have (librar, facilities)?
          • What happens when anyone can get access to these materials? What is the value added by the institution?
        • One of the questions also becomes whether or not we are willing to do something different as well as what we were doing before?
          • Can we teach as much and do elaborate research projects?
            • In libraries, for instance, if we are out there cataloging every web page like we do every book, then there are certain things we can and can not do with every resource.
  • Conceptual Challenges
  • If we want to draw a variety of perspectives into looking at the problems, then how do we maintain scientific rigor and have inclusion at the same time?
    • The wisdom of crowds argument
    • What if everyone in the crowd is wrong?
    • How far can we push this from opinion to educated judgment
    • Universities that have resources as compared to those who do not
    • Digital ivory tower
  • How do we convince skeptics of the potential without solid evidence?
  • Avoiding the “trust me” syndrome and making a case for how to spend money

Where to start?

  • Starting in the schools, doing things in a connected way is good, but they are doing things on a superficial level and we have not done a good job of packaging this information
  • Getting info from 19th century and putting it out there for people to gobble up
  • Getting the next generation of scholars being more insistent on this kind of work
  • Encourage the convinced to talk to those who “don’t get it”
    • Don’t want to be dismissive, but there are some who need to at least not stand in the way for others to bring this work forward
    • There are those who place lots of value in traditional kinds of work and we need to convince them that there are ways to do otherwise
  • Look at pockets of innovation and support that work rather than spread things too thin
    • There are things that people are doing, but don’t contribute to the infrastructure
  • We can stop doing some things if they don’t seem important
    • The world won’t come to an end if the pre-prints don’t come to the mailbox
  • Some kinds of work that might seem frivolous might come to be valuable in the end
    • The gaming metaphor and how there is something profound there
    • If you can learn by doing something with a game, we need to embrace that kind of shift in thinking

My Reflections

As I prepare materials for CMU’s online repository, CONDOR, I have been considering many of these same issues. What “counts” for me in terms of creating blog posts, wikis for my class, opening up content that has been published in “locked” journals? I want to be a young scholar who pushes these issues in my department, college, and university, yet I want tenure, too. I think that I am striking a good balance in doing the types of scholarship that is considered as legitimate by my colleagues and publishing in these types of open forums, yet there are still the nagging concerns that my work will not be understood. So, I continue with the both/and philosophy (publish in books and peer reviewed journals as well as in digital formats such as blogs, podcasts, and other forums).

Certainly, these will be issues that I wrestle with for years to come, if not my entire career, so hearing her talk today helped me see my concerns in a larger educational context.

Note from “Blogging — Maximizing Writer’s Notebooks with a 21st Century Dimension”

Here are notes from my Crossroads Writing Project colleagues, Lavon Jonson and Sonja Mack: “Blogging — Maximizing Writer’s Notebooks with a 21st Century Dimension.”

  • Background
    • Bringing blogging into the traditional process of using a writers notebook
    • Writing with your students encourages them to write (Graves, etc.)
  • Blog Growth
    • In April 2007, 70 million blogs, 90% by teenagers
    • In four years the growth has been phenomenal
  • Rationale for use in the classroom
  • Why use blogging in the classroom?
    • To share items from writer’s notebook (used to share it in a circle on the floor, now we do it on blogs)
    • Edublogs forums (support video)
  • Blogs to check out

    What we’ve noticed from our students

  • All students are able to contribute
  • Comments are more heartfelt

OLPC Keynote from SITE 2008

Sorry that it took so long, but getting back to another crazy week finds me now, on the Friday might before MRA 2008, catching up on SITE.

That said, I have one final set of notes and reflections, and this keynote was a good one. Dr. Antonio Battro, the Chief Education Officer for One Laptop Per Child delivered an excellent keynote address and post-keynote discussion. Highlights from both are here, followed by my reflections.

Also, FYI, I have update my presentation post from a few days ago, and it now includes a podcast of my session.

Here are the notes from the keynote, followed by notes from the post-keynote discussion, and, finally, my reflections:

The Cognitive Challenges of the One Laptop Per Child Program
Antonio Battro, Chief Education Officer One Laptop Per Child

  • OLPC (and per teacher)
    • Sharing knowledge is a dialogue, and this is the essence of OLPC
    • The machines may change, but education must evolve
  • History
    • Nicholas Negroponte
      • 1960’s architecture of the machine
      • In Paris, Battro spent some time with him and in the early 80’s began thinking about deploying machines in remote countries
  • Five OLPC Principles
    • Child ownership
      • This is the key, as the child and the teacher own the computers and they are given to them as a gift
      • It is difficult to understand for many ministers of education, because they want the school to own the computer — not the child or teacher
      • When we go to the highest levels of the governments that we work with, this is the first obstacle that we have to overcome
      • Uruguay is the first country to adopt OLPC for the entire country, and the machine was produced in Shanghai
        • The machines arrived during the last week of classes in November and there was discussion about what to do
          • One group said that we should give the machines to the teachers with a workshop and when classes start again in March, the kids can get them
          • Another group said that this is not the OLPC idea — we should give the machines to the children tomorrow (and this is what happened)
          • 10,000 students received the machine
          • Doing research on children and teachers who get the machine with no formal training (this is the last time that this will happen since all the children will have machines next year)
    • Low ages
      • In many countries, the idea of having digital skills is meant for adolescents and older students
      • For OLPC, kindergarten is too late and we have designed a machine that is for early ages
      • The interface is adapted very well for a child even before they learn how to read and write
      • Uruguay is starting in kindergarten because they have seen so much success with the 5 and 6 year old children
      • This motivation to start early came from Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert
        • In about 1960, Seymour Papert said that all children will eventually have a computer
        • This was a crazy idea, but he was a prophet (he developed Logo)
      • Piaget
        • Constructionism (how the child constructs reality)
          • Learning to learn
          • Children teach — this was a very profound idea, too
            • At five years old, children are very good teachers and OLPC will have millions of teachers around the world
      • Howard Gardner
        • Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century
          • The human mind has evolved a number of separate organs/information-processing devices
          • Taking human differences seriously lies at the heart of the multiple intelligences perspective
            • We do a different kind of construction for each intelligence
              • Digital intelligence (“the click option”)
                • Everything boils down to a simple question: to click or not to click
              • What happens when a child makes a mental calculation (Hideaki Koizumi, 2006)
                • The frontal lobe is activated by mental arithmetic
                • The frontal lobe is not activated when using a calculator
                  • So, what could it being doing instead?
                  • His dream is to write a book with Hideaki Koizumi about the activation of the human brain when teaching
                  • Knowing that someone else doesn’t know something and then teaching it — this is an amazing human capacity, and children can do this
    • Saturation
      • Every child has a machine and it is like a vaccination
        • Once you have good trials, you have the obligation to vaccinate everyone or else the vaccine will not work
          • This idea was presented by Jonah Salk (correct name?)
        • We prefer to have a whole town or region saturated
          • One example: in a setting with all the ministers of a country where he took at picture
    • Connection
      • Ability to connect with other users
      • The computer is not a tool, it is an environment
    • Free and open source
      • Multiple languages for the machine
      • 100 books for the machine
  • Conclusion
    • Our approach has moved from education for the few and privileged (image of Greek forum) to one computer for all the children (image of a girl with the machine balanced on her head)
    • This is hope, justice, and peace
  • Questions and Answers
    • How might this affect countries that are not democratic?
      • OLPC is non-profit and incorporated in the USA
      • OLPC will go everywhere and try to join the education efforts in the country that we work with
        • Some places need an extra push
        • We are teachers without borders and many of our people are volunteers
      • Peru — putting machines in the most remote areas of the country
    • Bill Gates idea that technology will not solve the problems — we need teachers and electricity. How do you respond to this?
      • Battro discussed his experience as a medical doctor and the eradication of disease (saturation)
      • Also, OLPC is not about machines; instead it is about education (we must have water AND education — education today is about having a computer)
        • If you introduce the computer as a technical, colonial invention, then you are reducing education
        • Education has a value in and of itself, not just as a tool
        • In many difficult places today, there are lots of struggles but the governments are willing to give the computers out

Post-Keynote Discussion

  • Security — some people are worried that the laptops will be stolen and used for illicit purposes
    • Response — the machine isn’t “on the market,” so it doesn’t have a price
    • Also, if it is lost, it can be permanently disabled from afar
    • Finally, the communities that have these laptops know that they are for the children. If adults have them, and they are are not teachers, then it is likely stolen
  • Maintenance — worries about fixing the machines in remote spots
    • Response — easy to open and repair, if it can’t be done at school it can be mailed
    • Eventually, it would be great if people could just take their laptops to any post office and, like other items like keys, they would automatically be sent in for repair and then back to the child
  • Student Use — what is happening for teachers training to support student use?
    • Rapid deployment of laptops and teachers are changing pedagogy quickly, too
    • Teachers are moving from classroom to classroom to see new practices
  • School Architecture — how do the laptops affect this?
    • Changing from desks and rows to tables and chairs in South America

    Printers — why can’t they print easily?

    • Printers are disruptive, ink is expensive, and it encourages old ways of production and transmission of information (worksheets)
  • Support — how can educators help?
    • Need more than just money from big corporations. Family, teachers, and students can use the machines for authentic purposes (USB plug in monitors and probes)
  • Education — there is a consensus that we need to change, but we are working with public funds. Also, many governments see teachers as obstacles, but we see them learning with the students. Teachers are our best collaborators. If all kids have the machine, then they are going to use it all the time. Saturation of laptops is the medical equivalent of vaccination.
  • Concluding comments — this is a project not about laptops, but about students and teachers.

Reflections

The juxtaposition of us, as educators concerned about social justice and equitable access, sitting in the cavernous conference hall of a casino on the strip in Las Vegas did not elude me. Here we were, with our $1000 (or $2000 or $3000 laptops), writing from America’s heart of conspicuous consumption about how “little green machines” are working around the world to empower youth as producers of knowledge, media, and culture. In a town where one is inundated by only a few views of what counts as culture, we had to buy into that part of the illusion to be able to sit in the room with an educator who is, literally, changing the world from a grassroots level.

Dr. Battro, as both an MD and PhD, shared a unique perspective with us on why the laptops have to be in the hands of every child. What public health officials understand about vaccinations are that they are not helpful at all unless everyone gets them. In that sense, it would not serve to only give laptops to some children, or to stop after this initial roll out is complete. This program is designed to be sustainable, a educational inoculation for generations to come.

My question for him was about the imminent release of Windows XP for the laptop. His response: it doesn’t matter to me. In other words, it really is about the literacies enable by the machine, not the particular tools. I will be interested in seeing how that plays out, especially if XP goes open source.

Well, there was a lot of information from that session. Even as I reread it a week later and half a continent away, on the cusp of another conference, I am still intrigued by the core message that this is not a laptop initiative, it is an educational initiative. This can not be underestimated and gives me pause to think about the ways that I continue to frame discussions of technology and literacy, and reminds me that I need to play with my own children as they teach me about their laptops.

Brown Bag Presentation: Multiliteracies in Composition

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:

Lynch, Dennis A., and Anne Frances Wysocki. “From First-Year Composition to Second-Year Multiliteracies: Integrating Instruction in Oral, Written, and Visual Communication at a Technological University.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 26.3 (2003): 149-171.

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?
  • How does the continuing focus in professional organizations on 21st century lliteracies contribute to this discussion (last week’s NCTE statement on the future of composition), both for college and life?
  • 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.

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From Workshop to Classroom: The Problems of Enacting Professional Development

This past week, I was invited to present an introductory workshop on digital storytelling to a group of teachers in Alpena. Minus some minor glitches in figuring out file management with brand new jump drives, the session went well from both my perspective and that of the attendees. Exit comments were generally positive and, since I will be working with this group again, the suggestions will be very helpful, too.

Yet, in the section of the evaluations that asked teachers to rank items such as the objectives of the workshop being met, the organization, and so forth, all the positive responses were overshadowed by one question that received unusually low marks: “The impact this inservice will have on my teaching will probably be…” Responses here were at least one point lower, on average, than every other category.

This struck me as interesting because, throughout the day, we had been having discussions about access in their schools: access to computer labs and equipment, access to certain websites (such as Flickr), and access to time for planning and implementing such a project. As I reviewed these lower scores, then, I saw them not so much as a reflection on the workshop itself as much a reflection on the school contexts to which these teachers would return the next day.

I write this here not to speculate on any particular way to solve this problem, since we know the digital divide is still evident in all of our work, even in the most well endowed schools. Yet, I found it interesting that a group of engaged professionals who found the process of digital storytelling valuable and wanted to do it with their students felt, at the end of the day, as if this wouldn’t necessarily impact their classrooms due to these issues.

Moreover, I shouldn’t sound bleak, because I know that enacting professional development in the classroom is a long term-process. I wouldn’t be doing this kind of work if I didn’t believe in sustainable change over time.

Yet, these evaluations were a concrete reminder of the very real challenges that even the most motivated teachers will face. This might explain why, at a school that has nearly unlimited technology resources, Patrick Welsh explains why teacher morale is so low. He states:

Of course, the big question isn’t whether teachers like spending their time learning one new gizmo after another, but whether a parade of new technologies will help kids learn. From what I can see, that’s not the case.

A School That’s Too High on Gizmos – washingtonpost.com

I disagree with Welsh’s final claim. What I see is that technologies can help kids learn, if teachers are able to think critically about how to use them.

Yet, even with the time for professional development, sustained inquiry, and collaboration, they walk back into their classrooms with incredible demands on their time and attention that may make digital writing and digital teaching difficult, if not impossible, for them.

Apart from the idea that we give teachers more time or get more computers, what this raises for me is the idea that we have to do to shift our professional focus from “using the tools” to “engaging in literacy practices,” and all the subsequent shifts in teaching and learning that will result.

The problem, then, is how to continue that conversation, while still addressing the day-to-day needs of teaching.

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Literacy alive and well in computer age – Perspectives – Opinion – Technology

From the Google Reader….

It makes no sense complaining about the decline of the printed word. As it becomes just another medium, we are moving to a kind of multimedia literacy, where capability with print becomes no more important, or useful, than capability with image.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. There is no rule that says that the written word is superior to other forms of media. While some of us are print-oriented and will always remain so, there are people growing up to whom print is of comparatively minor importance.

The vast majority of these people will enter adult life as well educated as the generations before them. But they will rely less on books and newspapers, and more on television and the internet and multimedia.

We are not witnessing the decline of literacy, simply a new type of literacy. It is pointless to make moral judgements about the superiority of one medium over another.

Literacy alive and well in computer age – Perspectives – Opinion – Technology

Graeme Philipson makes a compelling argument for how our culture’s artists such as Doris Lessing and Elton John — both who decry the effects of the internet — need to change their perspectives about literacy in the 21st century. As a topic always on my mind, I found this opinion article a fresh take on the topic, especially the connection that Philipson makes between our thousands of years of oral history that has, only in the past few centuries, become replaced with print. Just because things are changing again doesn’t mean that we are in decline, it simply means that we need to adapt to the change.

This connects with a conversation that I was having yesterday with one of our college’s public relations consultants. She and I were talking about my research interests and how to make “literacy and technology” something newsworthy, and both struggling to find an angle on it. On the one hand, it seems that discussions of technology and literacy should be self evident. Yet, we continue to see school infrastructures and policies, teacher, administrator, and parent attitudes not reflecting a shift in thinking about this, and, as this EdWeek article points out, the fact that what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get treasured.

So, my question today is thinking about how to make technology and literacy — not just tech literacy, but instead the changing nature of literacy — a key part of the conversation that the media reports on with schools. Clearly, when they publish the box scores for the test results, people stand up and pay attention. Without being punitive, are there ways that we, as educators, can engage the media to get the story of technology and literacy shown to the general public in a compelling manner?

To be more concrete, I want the tone of the conversation in the media to change from “Why aren’t students passing the tests” to “Why don’t students have one-to-one access to laptops for use in their daily reading, writing, calculating, observing, predicting, analyzing, etc.?”

Philipson shows us a way to shift the conversation on the opinion page. Can we think about ways to do it on the front page, too?

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An Update on Blogging, Podcasting, and Wikiing with Pre-Service Teachers

January has been a busy month for me as I have been coordinating field placements for my ENG 315 students and we have begun exploring the use of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS in our teaching lives. When we began this work a few short weeks ago, only a handful of these pre-service teachers had heard of a wiki or a podcast, fewer still knew about RSS, some had a general idea about blogs, and none of them were thinking about how these tools would translate into the teaching of writing in their classrooms. So, we started slow, and now things are moving along quite well.

The second week, we downloaded Portable Apps, and I explained my rationale for why would use these tools — both because they are free and open source as well as the idea that they need to be able to take their data with them. We also started setting up our blogs, and discussed the Common Craft video on blogs, thinking about implications for our classrooms and personal learning. The third week, we turned our attention to understanding RSS and reading each other’s blogs. This week, we set up our Google Readers, and I am now challenging them to begin using RSS reading in their professional responses.

So far, this process is going fairly smoothly and I do not feel that I am detracting from the “content” of the course by focusing on the technologies. In fact, I feel that they are helping me get some ideas across even better. For instance, it is one thing to encourage them to read each other’s blogs; it is quite another to provide them with a combined feed of everyone in their class and invite them to read, through their Google Reader, everyone’s posts. I will be building in some time for people to read and comment each week, as their reading of other blog posts will help them activate their brains for our class discussions.

Also, I am finding that they are all having “aha” moments as we move forward. Some are seeing connections to other classes an projects, and I think that they are all starting to see the ways in which we can connect with one another. For instance, one student explained how she immediately subscribed to all her friend’s blogs and, while it wasn’t purely academic, that solidified in her mind the power of RSS to gather information. In a time where we take for granted that all of our students understand so much about the web intuitively, it is good to know that we can talk about these technologies in relation to the teaching of writing and that they can begin to see some new connections.

Next up, we will be working with Rob Rozema’s class at GVSU to post our “This I Believe” essays to a Ning social network and get comments across classes. Then, after spring break, digital stories. As we continue on in the semester, I am looking forward sharing more ideas. It is interesting to compare the snapshots of two generations of teachers that I am seeing this semester — the pre-service students and the in-service teachers in Project WRITE — and compare how they are engaging with similar technologies in different ways. I feel as if with the pre-service teachers, they can pick up on the technology quickly once it is introduced, yet the conversations about pedagogy are still emerging. for the in-service teachers, we are able to talk about pedagogy very easily, but only after very thorough discussions of how and why to use the technology.

The differences are clear and makes me even more aware of the generational gap that must be happening as new teachers enter schools. They are very excited about the technology, yet can’t talk about it in pedagogically sophisticated ways. Veteran teachers are, as they should be, very concerned about pedagogy. This dichotomy makes me wonder how we can get everyone speaking the same language and beginning to think more about the pedagogy and the technology at the same time, regardless of age or experience. Then, we need to layer in discussions of literacy for everyone, because those are not present yet.

More teaching to be done, for sure and it is a great deal of fun in additional to a continual pedagogical challenge.


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