How can we sponsor and deepen the natural swarming that happens in student blogs on a social network? This complex question is where several teachers — Paul Allison, Lee Baber, Madeline Brownstone, Susan Ettenheim, Teb Locke, and Chris Sloan — seemed to be at the end of their conversation here. Teb talked about the kinds of committed writing he is seeing in his 3rd - 5th graders blog, their social network, and their wiki. We also talked about the differences from typical school writing that we are seeingthe personal, digital writing students are doing for their peers on blogs in The Personal Learning Space and Youth Voices.
What we want to do is find ways to “salt” this personal, peer writing with the news of the day, such as next weeks elections. What do you think? What have your experiences been with students writing on a blog?
http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=71 My name is Carrie, and I am an education major at the University of Central Arkansas. I was wondering how teachers today feel about blogging. Has it had an impact on you? What are some of the ways blogging has helped you as an educatior? What are some of the aspects of blogging that you do not like? [...]
http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=72 David Warlick has been challenging us to tell “the new story .” Well here’s one.
Let’s imagine that we were in the middle of writing a history of blogging and podcasting in the elementary and middle school classroom. And let’s start with the experiences of the teachers who are going to join us on Teachers Teaching [...]
Where is podcasting now in the elementary and middle school classroom? On this weeks Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast, we’ve invited a couple of Writing Project teachers who have started a project connecting sixth graders from around the country on a blog and podcast called Youth Radio: Connecting Youth Voices. Glen Bledsoe, Gail Desler, Kevin Hodgson, and Jason Shiroff are some of the key players behind this site.
Like composition teachers at the 1966 conference at Dartmouth College, like social studies teachers carving out a unique discipline alongside history and sociology–”the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence”– perhaps those of us using digital photography, podcasts, Google maps, webcasts, wikis, video, del.icio.us, tags, blogs, Bloglines, Google Reader, online word processors, digital stories and poetry, and other Web 2.0 technologies need our own department, our own discipline, our own field of study. Perhaps we need our own interdisciplinary inquiry out of which to build curriculum and to reorganize the subjects that are taught in secondary schools. “Web Studies” would address new litercies that are not presently being taught in the traditional, core subjects. Web Studies needs to become more central in schools.
As I pack my bags to go to the National Council Teachers of English in Nashville , I’m wondering if I’m still an English teacher. Probably not. When I introduce myself at this year’s Annual Meeting of the National Writing Project , I’ve decided to call myself a “web studies teacher.” I know it’s a bit geeky, but I want to suggest how different I think my work is now from what it used to be when I was an English teacher or a writing teacher or even a technology teacher. I used to think of myself as a writing teacher who used computers. Now I see myself as one who teaches students how to communicate on the web, part of which involves writing.
Is it an academic question to ask, “Are you a writing teacher who uses computers? Or are you an Internet and web teacher who uses writing?” And does this mean that I’m out of place at the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting, held in conjunction with the National Council Teachers of English? Of course, both organizations have a big tent, and my professional (and personal) history is bound up with the Writing Project. But the question, “What is English?” has often been an important one in these groups of teachers.
Like the composition teachers at Dartmouth College forty years ago, I’m feeling the need for a new field of study. For them literature was only part of what they did, they were writing teachers who used literature, not literature teachers who asked students to write. I’m feeling a similar need to break away from composition teachers. There is so much in “web studies” now, so much to think about and to learn. the list of skills and expectations that we have in web studies isn’t the same as the list that a traditional English or writing teacher has. Of course if this is true, the next step is to begin to describe this body of knowledge, this field of study.
Fortunately, I’m not alone. Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, Will Richardson, Christopher Sessums, and David Warlick are some of my guides on this path toward a new discipline. From another direction, Tim Berners-Lee is promoting a new field of study that he and others are calling “web science.”
“Since its inception, the World Wide Web has changed the ways scientists communicate, collaborate, and educate. There is, however, a growing realization among many researchers that a clear research agenda aimed at understanding the current, evolving, and potential Web is needed. If we want to model the Web; if we want to understand the architectural principles that have provided for its growth; and if we want to be sure that it supports the basic social values of trustworthiness, privacy, and respect for social boundaries, then we must chart out a research agenda that targets the Web as a primary focus of attention.
When we discuss an agenda for a science of the Web, we use the term “science” in two ways. Physical and biological science analyzes the natural world, and tries to find microscopic laws that, extrapolated to the macroscopic realm, would generate the behavior observed. Computer science, by contrast, though partly analytic, is principally synthetic: It is concerned with the construction of new languages and algorithms in order to produce novel desired computer behaviors. Web science is a combination of these two features. The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale. These human interactions are, in turn, governed by social conventions and laws. Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial patterns to occur.”
There’s so much that I’ve thrown up here that needs to be digested. I look forward to the next few days at the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting because I’ll be seeing face-to-face many off the people who form my own personal web of teachers who help me think and plan in the New York City and National Writing Project and in the World Bridges community. Tomorrow I’ll betraveling , but I hope to catch up with Teachers Teaching Teachers somewhere between the airport and my hotel room! Susan Ettenheim will be facilitating the conversation this week at 9:00 PM Eastern, at EdTechTalk.com . Please join us then.
Paul Allison calls in from the airport in Atlanta on the way to Nashville for the annual meeting of The National Writing Project and Susan Ettenheim, Teb Locke, Madeline Brownstone and Lee Baber host a conversation about this week’s challenges with students and online communication and collaboration. Sharon Peters shares her first adventures as her students join in the online conversation. Teb shares a very exciting discovery about introducing the mapping projects into the wiki. Here is an example of wiki with an embedded media player: http://theneighborhoodschool.org/wiki/index.php?title=Madison%2C_CT
The students in the middle school elgg are comparing notes on what it’s like to be a teenager. Some students in Virginia are getting hunting licenses and some students in NYC are talking about going to clubs. They are sharing similarities and differences. The teachers are reflecting and adjusting and refining the technical and social aspects of multiple schools and many students talking together.
Another conversation that came up was how to meet curriculum requirements while participating in the elgg and various strategies being used by teachers on both the middle school and high school levels. Students in the high school elgg are learning to introduce researched evidence and snippets from various sources to support their posts. Susan tried to share Paul’s strategy about introducing and using focussed sentences into the writing and gently pushing teens to learn how to deepen and enliven their exchanges with evidence, but by then Paul was off on another airplane so hopefully he will review that with us next time we all get together.
We also talked about sharing elgg lessons at schools.wikia.com (http://schools.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Search?search=lesson&go=Go). Madeleine summed it all up well, noting that the students are learning both how to pace their conversations and get into the conversation and bond with each other.
You’ll hear some audio difficulty due to the time delay encountered with Paul’s call at the beginning of the show and a very buggy skypecast. With severe storms all over the east coast, Paul’s plane ended up in Atlanta and Sharon called in from her conference in Atlanta. They were on air at the same time and probably only a few miles from each other in real life! Despite all technical challenges, you will find some interesting new discoveries this week. Please post here in the comments area and share your own stories and discoveries this week.
It may not be overly dramatic, but I'm enjoying these moments in my classroom, when I can go around and interview students, simply asking them, "What are you doing?" This was recorded on a Monday at the beginning of a regular week -- when there are no planned vacations or breaks... just four straight days of blogging. What I'm finding exciting this year is the ways I've found to allow students to find their own subject matter around which to read, write, find images, and listen to and create podcasts.
Here are some things we’ve been thinking about as we prepare for this week’s webcast, which — as always — will be at 9:00 p.m Eastern. Please join us at EdTechTalk.com.
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How can we bring social networks and blogs into the classroom without killing them? Maybe we shouldn’t even try. Just because MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Sconex are popular with (many, not all of) our students, why should we bring technologies like these into our classrooms? Some of us might answer that blogging is a way to bring newliteracies and energy — our students’ capabilities and motivations — into our classrooms. We might even argue that the reading and writing that (many, not all of) our students do online is a powerful undergroundresource , waiting to be tapped. For many students, communicating online has become akin to a mother-tongue, and for a long time, good reading and writing teachers have known how important it is to begin with the mother-tongue as we expand students’ language use. At the very least, blogging can be seen as a way to help students connect what happens in our classrooms to life outside of school. If these are some of the reasons why teachers are bringing blogs into the classroom, the next questions have to do with how to do it. It’s not as easy as it sounds to be true to “cyber-youth literacies” and our academic, adult goals for reading and writing in school.
Recently, while in at The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) meeting in Nashville, Clarence Fisher asked questions about what he was seeing after attending a couple of sessions where teachers were using new media:
Sessions like these make me think two main things. First of all, we still don’t get it. We are still trying to appropriate the literacy practices of youth culture, and co-opt them for our own means. We use hip - hop to teach grammar. We use blogs to nitpick the ultra fine points of novels and to teach grammar. We don’t honour the literacy practices of the people in our classrooms for what they are. To many teachers, they are not legitimate on their own. It is OK to use blogs, as long as we are tearing apart their writing while we use them. We will teach them how to shoot video, but only for a “feel - good” unit, a reward if they work hard on the other stuff we want them to do. New literacy practices become the sugar which makes the medicine go down easier. Second, we still crave control. We are willing to give kids the experience of blogging, if they are responding to a list of prompts. We are willing to use video if the videos are a series of X number of shots, each lasting no longer then X number of seconds. We definitely do need to teach structure and use frameworks with kids; they need a frame and a form to hang their thinking on, but to me, it smacks of assignments not changing. Are we still doing old things in new ways? 5 paragraph essays in video form?
Many of us have felt Clarence’s frustration as schools somehow resist change, even at this time of radical departures from what went before. Teachers who with blogs in the classroom recognize how difficult it is to get out of the way of student blogging. But also, doesn’t there have to be something different in what we do in our classrooms from what they might be doing at home after school? The good news is that there are some success stories to report. The teachers working with twoelggs, PersonalLearningSpace.com (middle school) and YouthVoices.net (high school) have been giving students control. We’ve been finding ways to “give students the experience of blogging” without “responding to a list of prompts.”
One of the ideas we are working on with students in these high school and middle school elggs is “20 Questions: 10 Self and 10 World”. This is an idea that we’ve adapted from James A. Beane’s notions of the integrated, democratic curriculum. Here’s how a blogger from New Zealand, Bruce Hammonds, recently summarized Bean’s ideas:
Beane believes students need to be brought together to develop their own curriculum by combining their concerns and self interest with ‘common good’ in a collaborative and democratic way. For such a curriculum to be worthwhile he believes it must both address significant issues and engage students in an active and meaningful way. After the two key questions have been asked (1. ‘What question or concerns do you have about yourself?’ and 2.‘What questions or concerns you have about the world?’) students gather in groups to discuss the questions and then work with their teachers to help them group common concerns into themes.
Following Beane, we begin blogging with students by asking them to produce 10 questions about the world and 10 questions about themselves. Of course, when we did this, some students wanted to know what it meant. What questions should they write about themselves? We also had to stop and think! How can you explain “self” to a teenager? The teenage years are an age when self gets defined and blogging about their own questions is a way for students to gain the confidence to find their identity. Asking for ten questions “about the world” seemed equally strange at first. It’s not easy to trust that young people will to find ten meaningful questions about the world. Isn’t it the teacher’s job to come up with good questions? Learning to truststudents to write good questions without giving them a lot of guidelines is something that we seem to need to learn over and over. We keep wanting to link their questions to a curriculum theme, essential question, or some other structure. But we are finding that students do come up with important themes to blog about when they are allowed to select their own questions.Do our blogs have a student-sponsored life of their own? Have our blog sites moved beyond Fisher’s “new literacy practices as sugar” to allowing students to “combine their concerns and self interest with the common good?” Sometimes, and it remains a goal to make our elgg spaces — our students blogs in social networking sites — into places online where they cantruly express, question, explore and research subjects that matter to them.
What can be said for certain is that these are some of the issues that we will be discussing on Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. We’d love for you to join us. Tell us a story of when you’ve been able to “honour the literacy practices of the people in our classrooms for what they are.” Or tell us about how hard it is to do this, or even why you wouldn’t want to. Tune us in at EdTechTalk.com and be ready to tell stories of blogging in your classroom.
We weren’t able to include Troy Hicks in this, our 30th broadcast of Teachers Teaching Teachers. That was a good thing, because he sent us this comment about the conversation. Read, listen, and please respond!
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Although I wasn’t really able to join the conversation tonight through Skype, the Teachers Teaching Teachers crew asked a great question tonight:
Do our blogs have a student-sponsored life of their own? Have our blog sites moved beyond Fisher’s “new literacy practices as sugar” to allowing students to “combine their concerns and self interest with the common good?” Sometimes, and it remains a goal to make our elgg spaces — our students blogs in social networking sites — into places online where they can truly express, question, explore and research subjects that matter to them.
One of the ideas that I wanted to take up in this conversation was that of genre. It seems to me that Paul, Susan, Teb, and the rest of the TTT crew are getting at the idea that blogging and social networking could be seen as appropriating online teen culture, as Clarence Fisher seems to be arguing here. I feel that blogging, social networking, and podcasting don’t so much appropriate teen culture as they represent new genres and, because of that, the ways that we think about teaching them in school matter a great deal as to how much, if at all, students learn how to utilize these genres.
In thinking about teaching new media genres, then, I want to share a quick example of how this is, perhaps, a very difficult concept to even wrap one’s head around, let alone teach, if you are not a part of the edublogger community. I had the good fortune of working with a class of pre-service teachers the other day, and we were talking about new literacies and technologies. One section of the article that we read discussed the five-paragraph essay as the typical model of school literacy and how technology threatens to change that genre. This caused a great deal of discontent. Suffice it to say that the pre-service teachers with whom I work came up with a question that essentially boiled down to this: if not a five-paragraph essay, then what else instead? I was taught the five-paragraph essay, I succeeded, I know that kids need to know it (or, at least that is what I believe because I haven’t seen convincing evidence to the contradict my own personal experience), and that is what I will teach them. It is a hard cycle to break.
So, how are blogging, wikiing, podcasting, and other new media writing — and the genres that they enable — different? Paul wrote extensively about what blogging can be in the TTT post, so I won’t reiterate it here. What I do want to say, however, is that I think we need to help our colleagues and those that we mentor to understand how writing on a blog or wiki, or creating a podcast, is still writing at its core (creating a text for a specific purpose and audience), but the affordances of the media and the genres that you can create with that media are very different from what we have traditionally conceived as writing. We can move beyond the five-paragraph essay because we can now talk about — and in compelling new media deliver — texts like we never have before. I don’t think we can give up the old genres, but we also have to think about how to compose with the new ones, too.
Do I want to see students’ five-paragraph essays on a blog? No. But, I think that we need to help our colleague envision what is possible in these new media. Is that appropriation? I don’t think it is. If we ask students to collaboratively write with a wiki and only one student does all the work, then we are reinscribing all the bad practices of that genre for teaching writing. Appropriation gone bad. If we ask students to post a book report to a blog and then offer feedback to others, not allowing for uses of hypertext and the natural conversations that will bubble up, then we are reinscribing all the bad practices of that genre, too. Appropriation gone bad, again.
Instead, we need to help teachers see the potentials of these new media and the genres they allow. Then we won’t need to worry about appropriating. We will need to think more about invention, discovery, and creativity, traits that we would wish on all our writers.
