Collaborative Research

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Collaborative Research

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Collaborative Writing And Critique

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Collaborative Writing And Critique

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Skype and Linear Thinking in Technology

A colleague in my office and I discussed the fact that we both had skype accounts last week. I need to do some investigating with what the computers on our teachers desks have for audio and video setup. While newer computers have built-in webcams and such, I'm not sure that our classroom computers are quite there yet.

I did have an interesting experience with Skype last winter at the NSDC (National Staff Development Council) winter conference. I was in a session on technology and the presenter contacted a teacher in Kansas who was doing some work in her classroom that was related to the topic of conversation in our workshop session. The contact was clearly not arranged in advance, but the teacher was able to share some insights about her work in the classroom and we could see the class working behind her. A couple of students quickly shared what they were doing and we thus had instant examples and feedback around the staff development topic we were discussing. It was a very powerful moment.

Like many of the tools that we are experiencing in this class, the hardest piece is going to be getting teachers to understand the possibilities and to become comfortable with the technology. Last week I participated in a webinar being presented by some graduate students here at the U. Their topic was related to how to utilize technology in a single computer classroom, and they had some examples including Aaron Deuring's work with science. What was really interesting; however, was the fact that the presentors were experiencing some technical difficulties. We used that moment to have a short discussion about how technical problems can push teachers away from using technology and they are very reluctant to return. At the same time, technical difficulties are inevitable. Particularly when our own knowledge of the technology is pretty limited.

Anyway, skype is still at the edges of my own usage as my network of tech savvy folks is limited. My own life is more like the single computer classroom model, where technology is becoming collaborative but where many applications have to do with creating and delivering content in models that still resemble linear traditional settings.

The real question is how do we move forward to truly capitalize on the collaborative possibilities? Yes.

A Podcast

The video included below is a project created to learn a little about video editing. It previews my final project to the extent that it formulates some questions that I want to deal with in my final project. The project itself will be a series of videos that provide training for staff in my school district around how to implement some of the digital writing strategies that we have learned in my digital writing class. Included in the instruction will be a discussion of the impact of digital writing strategies on student agency and engagement as well as the specific state writing standards that are best served through digital writing.

I intentionally pulled a clip from the web for this, as I want to learn how to do the whole sampling thing. This particular video uses too much of the original to really be fair use, but it was useful to get the idea of how to sample. My apologies to jcmdi.com, who should get credit for the original source material over which I placed my text.

The reference to ying should be jing. :)

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I missed the online role play exercise today, which is ironic since I have been quite successful at making the face to face classes and now had an opportunity to participate from the comfort of my own home. Unfortunately, I was late getting home from a new teacher event that I was hosting for my school district and my daughter had hit herself in the eye with her keys and needed help with her homework and both kids were hungry and holy cow it was 6:30 before I finally logged on and low and behold everyone had signed off and moved on to things in their less than virtual worlds around them.

Still, I enjoyed reading the article and browsing through the many blog posts. Last week, when I created my character for the role play I enjoyed that as well and was looking forward to participating. My character was a school administrator who disagreed with the premise that google is making us stupid, which would have been easy for me since I personally disagree with the idea that change is inherently bad; a concept that is at the root of the headline.

It is not necessarily the position of the author, who is really speculating more reflectively on the nature of the changes in our reading habits given the nature of the digital literacy experience. As a person who has never been particularly good at the kind of close reading that the author seems to value, I don't find that my reading habits have changed much as a result of digital literacy. I have always been prone to skimming a text, and enjoy novels that can easily be moved through quickly (plot driven novels like those of Dan Brown and John Grisham). At the same time, I like a thick biography too; however, dense texts with lots of descriptive prose tend to leave me cold. In any event, my point is that my natural reading habits are much like those described in the article.

At the same time, I have had periods of being a voracious reader and other times when I don't open a book for long periods of time. These usually correlate to specific periods in my life; not to changes in my brain chemistry or neurological connections. These anecdotes of changed reading habits are more likely a function of increasingly busy lives than anything else -- we all had more time to read when we were college students.

And, as Carr points out, if change does exist it is not necessarily bad. Still, balance is a virtue and finding time in one's life to slow down, smell the roses, and read a book with some density to it.

The real question is how do we absorb the need to prepare kids for the twenty-first century while at the same time avoiding western cultural obsession with an excessively fast paced lifestyle. Here's a video perspective on the question.

Having said all that the real question we were to have engaged today (which I didn't) was what the experience of participating in the online role play was like. Here were the questions...

1. What were some things that you did to create your role through use of language, information in/images used for your bio?
2. What arguments were you making to convince other roles to support your position?
3. What evidence or reasons were your employing to support your positions? Do you think that this evidence or reasons were effective in convincing others to adopt your positions?
4. Which roles had the most versus least power in this role-play? What are some reasons that these roles did or did not have power? What were some strategies that the roles with power employed?
5. Were there differences between your personal beliefs and those of your role? Did your own personal beliefs on this issue change at all due to the role-play?
6. How might you use an online role-play in your teacher to address certain issues or teacher about an event or text?

The video I included above was one of the things I was going to bring to the discussion. I was looking forward to the ability to share the video as a part of the discussion. How cool is it that I could embed the video in a post and then have folks react to it as a part of a conversation?

In looking at the posts, it is interesting that to some extent the usual movement to demagoguery is fairly effective. The characters who were more extreme and colorful in their arguments were attention getting. In the final analysis, I'd like to think that the reasonable arguments carried the day, but readers/listeners/viewers tend to absorb the things that support the positions they already hold. Cynical, ain't I? Still, the fact that folks might argue for positions they don't believe in argues for a more open and critical discourse. I wonder to what extent people tend to drift toward the opinions they have been assigned to argue?

Clearly, the fact of having a specific assigned time to do this conversation lent itself to increased participation (except for my own personal experience). When I was teaching English I used to take the kids to the computer lab and have them participate in discussion board postings about books we were reading. I found that they would sometimes create much more robust conversations with their classmates who were sitting around them than they would have if they had sat in a circle and been given the same prompt. It also was much more democratic, as the loudest voices had no more access to the discussion than the quietest.

So, the real question isn't, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" It's, "Is Google Making Us Different?" The answer is probably yes. The challenge is to change to something better...if there is such a thing under the sun.

Thoughts on Wikis

I am a big fan of electronic collaboration, and have promoted it in my job as a staff developer as well as in my work with the theater extra-curricular at our high school. However, my experience has been that without some kind of external pressure, getting folks to contribute can be difficult. This fits with other comments about the need for authentic purpose in writing, and the reality is that many folks are not particularly motivated to write. This is not to say that they don't have something to say, but writing is work. I fancy myself a competent writer, and yet absent an external force I rarely do it. At the same time, a collaborative writing forum provides an opportunity for those who ARE motivated to do their writing in a public forum that provides opportunity for synergy. I think that has the potential to be powerful.

An obvious example of where that synergy has worked is Wikipedia itself. Despite critiques from various perspectives, the reality is that Wikipedia is a valuable resource that is becoming increasingly reliable as its data is more routinely vetted by knowledgeable participants. No, it cannot be used without care, but all media should be consumed critically, including published encyclopedias that have the blessing of the establishment.

The Wiki that I am working on for this class is a site that is collecting advice for new teachers. I am the Induction and Mentoring Coordinator for our school district, and I would love to have a more informal and centralized resource for new teachers around the many things that new teachers need to know.

I am also planning on starting a Wiki for our theater department that has policies and procedures that the student leadership can help create.

A Voice Thread about the International Thespian Festival

This is a voice thread using some pictures from a student trip that I do every summer to the International Thespian Festival. Interestingly, I will probably use this object to help promote next year's festival.

For students, the ability to rearrange the pictures and vary the comment type provides some useful ways to think about structure. For instance, I am using a fairly straightforward chronological structure, but a student could use thematic, or some other structure that fit their purpose. By being able to simply lift and move the pictures, they are able to experiment with structure in a way that would make it easy to engage outcomes related to narrative structure and form.

Similarly, the visual aspect of the project allows concepts like tone, juxtaposition, etc. to come to the fore as well. One could also talk about tone in terms of the comments. Are you excited? Expressive? Etc. In my case, because I was recording my comments in a public lab, I was somewhat subdued in how I recorded my messages.

Pictures for my class

Here's a link to some pictures that I am going to use for an assignment in my Digital Literacy class.



More editorial comment later. :)

My Bubble Map

Peace and Tranquility

I have a couple of launching platforms today, so we'll see where they lead.

In a facebook chat with a former student I was recalling an experience I had while working on my Masters in Education at the University of Minnesota.  I was working as a Teaching Assistant for a writing intensive course in the Kinesiology department and walking from the campus to the professor's office, which was across a busy street at the edge of campus.  As I waited for the light to change a limo slid by and in the back, visible so I guess a window may have been open or the windows weren't the usual heavy tint, sat a little guy in the garb of a buddhist monk who looked for all the world like the Dalai Lama.  He waved at me.  I waved back, somewhat bemused, and the light changed and I continued on my way.  Turns out the Dalai Lama was in fact in two for some kind of conference and that was exactly with whom I had crossed paths.

Now, I don't in any way shape or form aspire to be a celebrity chaser.  I have no interest in the latest news of the personal lives of the movers and shakers of our world, popular or meaningful.  And yet, that story is one that I am fairly quick to tell and it leaves me with something palpable in the way of my awareness of my own striving for peace and tranquility.  It's a real journey and there are those people in our lives, personal or distant, who help us to capture that sense of our own trajectory that leans toward meaningful introspection.  Something about that moment makes me feel better able to affirm something within myself that values a way of life that I don't often manage to capture.

On another front, I had the opportunity to read a friends application for the doctoral program at the U this eventing.  His personal statement was wrapped up in his experiences as an educator wherein he struggled with the dichotomy between the authentic and the reproduced.  This is a guy that I have had a lot of conversations about in regard to how education seems to systemically constrain itself to reproduction rather than authentic creation of knowledge.  In any event, his writings led me to muse on my own journey through education....and so, non-existent reader, here are some of my own musings around my journey.

When I was first in college I lived with a couple of guys who, like me, figured that the world was our apple (chestnut, oyster, whatever) and I remember a fair amount of time spent conjencturing on what it would be like if we started our own school.  We were pretty serious about it and had drawings for the layout of the school and plans for our startup program.  Of course, we had no idea about what we really wanted to accomplish, other than to reproduce the things about school that we liked while minimizing the things we didn't enjoy.  Fast forward past a career running a small family business and a twenty year process of acquiring an undergraduate degree (I'm a very strange kind of academic) and in the summer of 2000 I started the post-back program at the University of Minnesota.  The program provides training for initial licensure as a teacher while positioning the participants to complete their Masters in Education as a terminal experience of the program.  In the fall of 2001 I started teaching for the Roseville Area School district, which I did until the Fall of 2007, when I became a Staff Development Coordinator for that same school district.

I am not the kind of person who deconstructs the context within which I find myself.  I am a builder.  I work to find the best things in my context, maximize them, and to at least some degree I often find myself sliding into whatever power vacuum exists and taking on leadership roles that align with the goals of the guiding paradigm of that context.  I am not a revolutionary.  Maybe I'm a really good bureaucrat. And yet, little by little, and particularly since I have left the classroom and found myself looking into classrooms from the outside, I am struck by the inexorable reproduction of education and the inability of the system to allow it's elements to really engage in practices that are responsive to and engaging for students.

We know what we should be doing but we consistently allow a host of external factors to prevent us from the good work that leads to student learning.

More on this later.  Time to pause and reflect.

What to do, what to do?

I have to begin thinking about a final project for my class in digital literacy at the U and my obvious starting point is to start considering where the intersection between student engagement, standards, and digital media might be.  The connection is obvious in terms of digital media and student engagement...kids are obviously more engaged by the interactive digital environment.  But there are two issues that immediately come to mind -- one that relates to standards and another that relates to learning styles.

Regarding standards, I would love to do some work with taking a really close look at the secondary writing standards and considering how a more student-driven digital writing performance assessment compares with more traditional forms of essay work in regard to meeting the articulated standards.

The other issue, which lives inside of engagement and learning, has to do with the tension between digital zooming and the need for some folks to slow down to absorb information.  This relates to my own personal learning style in that I find that when I am using the internet for research, reading and writing I have a hard time slowing down and allowing my brain to engage in a meaningful way that allows reflection and absorption.  This is a cognitive issue for me personally.  Given the research that suggests that computer based activities increase student learning, how does that connect to my personal struggle to slow down when I'm speeding up?  I think this relates at least in part to flow as explored by Csikszentmihalyi.

For instance, my most enjoyable research moments have been when I am in the library with access to the physical journals that I am finding online.  This blend of physical and virtual research tools allows me to vary my pace and engage on different levels and with varying intensities.  One or the other alone has limiting elements.

We have to stop saying no to kids...and teachers, too.

A recent article out of New Hampshire highlights a teacher who provided a writing prompt that led to disciplinary action. Briefly, the teacher asked students to write on the question, "If you knocked your brother down, would you urinate in his mouth?"

Clearly a provocative prompt. The setting...a class of about twelve seniors in a high school.

A quick review of some of the blogosphere comments on this article revealed an interesting assortment of prejudices regarding education and teachers. Some though the teacher should be walked out out of the school.

What is interesting to me is the ongoing belief that we have that ideas, statements or texts (media or otherwise) have the capacity to endanger our children. Notwithstanding the fact that a seminar size group of high school seniors can hardly be perceived as impressionable children, what is the likelihood that anything a teacher does within a single classroom is going to shift the values and beliefs of an adolescent when compared with the weight of 14-17 years of programming that precedes that moment in the classroom?

I say, perturb the system! Get the student's attention!

Otherwise we are just turning out a bunch of mashed potatoes. Processed flakes for that matter.

http://www.wmur.com/education/20990241/detail.html

And a confession...

What is particularly upsetting about the grading question is that I was guilty of the same practice. I worked hard to be fair and to focus on learning, but our instructional practices are so heavily determined by tradition and personal experience that we cannot help but reproduce the repressive norms of compliance building.

We must move past compliance to engagement and to valuing real learning.

Grading

The earlier post mentioned two recent experiences. Here is the second one. I am outraged about this, but as I have watched my kids in school I have been outraged about it on numerous occasions.

My daughter is in the IB program at Cooper High School entering 9th grade and for the summer she had the pleasure of reading The Alchemist for her english course. This is a great text and the assignment was sufficiently innocuous not to have prevented her from enjoying the reading. She was asked to take notes on the text and to write a few paragraphs in response to some specific prompts.

She got this assignment back on Friday. It seems it was worth 35 points, 20 points for each of the four paragraphs, and fifteen points for her notes. Here is how she was graded...

Paragraph 1: 5/5

Paragraph 2: 3/5

Paragraph 3: 3/5

Paragraph 4: 3/5

Setting Notes: 1/5

Other Notes: 10/10

The only qualitative feedback she received was that paragraphs 2-4 and her setting notes were too short. There was not feedback regarding the quality of her thinking or of the stylistic elements of her writing. To the best of my knowledge, there was nothing in the assignment sheet indicating specific expectations for length.

Notwithstanding the pedagogical difficulty of having a scored evaluation of student product prior to any instruction having taken place, I want to use this work as an example of poor scoring practices. My apologies to anyone who has read anything about this topic, as it is an obvious example of the pitfalls of this grading practice.

First, note that the resulting score was 25/35, which would be a low C. Having seen the work before it was submitted, in the context of no instruction I am not sure how the teacher would justify this grade.

But, examine the individual elements of the score. The three paragraphs which seem to have fulfilled the requirement of the prompt but were arbitrarily identified as too short each received a grade of 60%, which would generally indicate very poor work. The setting section, which was arguably of low quality, received a grade of 20%, a grade that is unlikely to be assigned in any holistic approach. The cumulative consequence of these choices is that the assignment receives an overall grade that significantly understates the student's performance.

I see this all the time in classrooms where, rather than risk a more subjective and holistic qualitative score, the instructor protects themselves by identifying arbitrary elements that they are comfortable giving ridiculously low scores to because they seem like such insignificant point values. The cumulative effect, however, is not insignificant.

We do the same thing when we allow zero scores for missing work. The cumulative effect of zero scores is much greater than the actual deficiency in learning or performance would suggest.

Sigh...okay...well, so much for grading today. In short, if we graded learning instead of compliance, high school would begin to look very different.

Roadblocks

It has been an interesting year for me as an educator. I have spent the past two years as a staff development coordinator, and that journey has made me increasingly aware of the roadblocks that stand between our normal practices and the quality practices that could create engaged educational experiences for our students. There are a host of these, but for today I want to explore two experiences that happened in just the last couple of days.

The first of these was a meeting I had last Thursday with three very dedicated members of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction who are working with new teachers being licensed to teach Social Studies. I met with these folks along with a member of our Social Studies department in the interest of learning about what quality practices we might bring to our instruction of social studies at Roseville Area High School. What followed was an enlightened and interesting conversation about ways to make the content of social studies engaging and meaningful for our students. At the end of this conversation, having drilled down to the idea that our work needed to move slowly to explore social studies topics in a way that was relevant and also allowed deep thinking about topics of interest to the student, I posed a question related to the difficulty of doing these quality practices in light of the need to cover a rather imposing array of content standards for social studies. In short, teachers are prevented from quality instruction because they feel compelled to cover the standards. What was interesting was that noone in the room could recall a meaningful conversation with the state leaders in education as to how this very real challenge should be overcome.

Lets shift the conversation now to student engagement. I have been working over the past six months to create an educational research group to explore why it is that students become increasingly disengaged by education as they move further into their secondary years. As a consequence of this work, I have been involved in many conversations about what is and is not working in our secondary schools. The idea that we know what makes quality instruction but are not doing the things that we know we should be doing is a recurrent theme of these conversation. There is an interesting work related to this called "The Knowing Doing Gap", and some of the answers can also be found in Anthony Muhammed's work on school culture. But clearly, in the case of secondary social studies, the ongoing influence of ED Hirsch and our obsession with content standards is also to blame for this failure to create an environment that routinely engages our students.

It would seem that while we can continue to work to identify practices that result in increased student learning, we might be better served to spend some time exploring why we are not implementing the quality practices of which we are already aware.

More on this later...

Prompted Responses from CI5472

How you do might use a blog in your everyday lives and/or teaching (if you teach).

As you can see from the handful of posts from years past, blogging is something that has intrigued me in the same way that journaling is intriguing. Of course, personal journal entries aren't mediated by a publicly viewable audience, so they exist in a different way, but when I journal there is a real extent to which I am engaging in a conversation with myself. Blogging just opens up that conversation to the possiblity of having it be joined by a random assortment of other folks. I have always enjoyed writing, both analytically and creatively (which assumes a difference that in and of itself might be an interesting discussion), but have always lacked the discipline necessary to sustain my writing in a way that creates something of substance. I could see using a blog as a way to create an external accountability that might help create the discipline to write more consistently...or maybe not. :)

What are some of the ways in which you have or will use these tools as a student and/or teacher?

In my work both in the English classroom and more recently as a staff development coordinator I have utilized electronic media as a mechanism for communicating all kinds of different elements of collaborative work. What I am intrigued by now is the extent to which these communications have become more explicitly social. We communicate for the sole purpose of communicating much more electronically than in the past. We do not need to have a purpose. The thing itself is the purpose.

How do they enhance or hinder your communication with others?

I think they enhance. I hear a lot of criticism that abbreviated communications or distance communications are somehow less rich or meaningful, or that they inhibit live interactions. That seems unlikely to me and to source mostly from generational gaps in familiarity. My daughters ability to have 14,000 texts in a month do not dampen her desire to go to the park and hang out with her friends. My desire to post information through a district ning for new staff does not reduce my desire to stop by their classrooms or meet them on Friday for happy hour. I am unconvinced that we are sterilizing our relationships.

What are some things that you want to learn to do with digital writing in this course in terms of your own writing and/or teaching of writing?

I love the idea of becoming more deft with a whole range of tools. I see these as tools that integrate in many unexpected ways to the already established process of curricular development in which I participate in many different settings.

On the other hand...two years later.

Back in school to get that Masters finished and two years into doing staff development. Lots to report and it all is going to wait. For now, just an announcement that I will be using this Blog for my graduate school class and maybe get into a rhythm with it...or maybe not. :)