I’ll be joining the fine folks at Teachers Teaching Teachers folks tonight to discuss some ideas and issues around supporting teachers as they take their students online. It’ll be a good conversation about partnerships, second wave adopters, and lots more. If you’re so inclined, consider joining us at 7pm Mountain in the EdTechTalk chat room.
I’m not making any money plugging their program, I promise, but Open Source keeps doing good and interesting stuff. And I thank them for that by sending you to listen, thereby draining their bandwidth and other resources even more. For your listening pleasure tonight, I offer an aural feast on plagiarism, intellectual property, and from whence (and how, and why) we draw our inspiration. In The Ecstasy of Inspiration, Jonathan Lethem creates a collage of others’ words — presented as his own.
Sort of.
Here’s how the radio show describes the essay:
Nearly every word of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking
was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and then cobbled
together with a big dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole. Even
the “I”s aren’t Jonathan Lethem; they’re Jonathan Rosen writing in The Talmud and the Internet about John Donne, or William Gibson in a Wired article about William Burroughs, or David Foster Wallace on a grad school seminar, or Brian Wilson in a Beach Boys song.
But
this is more than a stunt. It’s a passionate salvo in the copyright
wars, a crowd of voices coralled together to say, basically: without
borrowing, stealing, cribbing, remixing, mashing-up, collaging and
compiling — without influences great and small, in other words — there
is no “creating.” No hip hop, sure, but also no blues, no Disney, no
Shakespeare. No Lolita or “I have a dream.” We’d be reduced to staring at campfires and barking at one another.
It’s a fascinating take on remix culture, what it means to use source material, and the Book of Ecclesiastes (or at least the first part, you know, about the stuff under the sun?).
I didn’t quite get it when I first read it, but listening to him talk about it in this podcast really was an intellectual treat. I hope you enjoy both the essay and the explication.
The takeaway for me? I’m not sure. I’m still digesting. You?
Lots of good stuff has either slid through the podcatcher or across the TV screen lately. Thought you’d be interested in these two.
Frontline is looking very seriously at the future of news as well as what it means to keep secrets in a four part series called NewsWar. A teacher’s guide is in the works and you can already view some of the show online. (Frontline also keeps a collection of episodes online for viewing. I love PBS. And WGBH.)
Open Source the radio show recently did an hour on the One Laptop per Child program. I’m wondering how to get one of those machines in hand so that I can fiddle a little bit — but I’m guessing that won’t happen anytime soon. One concern I have about the program is the notion that the computers are a magical solution. I hope no one expects that simply distributing laptops will create a better educated world.
Eric’s started a great discussion on creating a "killer EdApp." Be sure to follow along in the comments — some smart folks are chiming in over there. If you’re into PLE or CMS, you should certainly HOO (head on over). We sure can acronymize, can’t we, fellow educators?
As for me, I don’t want one killer app. There’re a bunch of things that I want to do (and that I want my students to do), and I’ve found that the better a tool gets at doing everything, the less useful it is at doing some things. Moodle‘s great for assignments and forums. But its wiki’s weak, and so is the blog. But Elgg‘s great for blogging, and Drupal‘s not bad.
One big strength of RSS and XML and the coming Semantic Web is the ability to personalize content. One of the hardest things about teaching is finding the line between individual expression and centralized standardization.
Why recreate the classroom when we don’t have to?
I want options, not one tool for everyone.
If you actually visit my blog, instead of just reading the feed, you’ll notice that I’m experimenting with Explode, a new social networking tool made by the same folks working on Elgg. It’s a temporary addition, unless I decide that it’s worth hanging on to. I’m not yet sure of its value — but I believe it might have some.
One of my great frustrations lately as a teacher is that I am not having more success teaching blogging, as in blogging the verb ala Will Richardson, to my students. The value of blogging, as I’ve come to learn, is in the way that it requires that I interact with source material, either another blogger or any other text that I can find to quote and think about. That interaction with sources is what I think is so, so, so essential in the education of students. If we are to teach students to teach themselves, we must focus our efforts on areas of basic communication and areas of interacting with other information. I know that statement is probably preaching to the choir, but maybe not.
Lots of the "successful" uses of blogs out there are those that aren’t really about interacting with sources. Posting homework online, unless the homework is source-specific, isn’t blogging, although it is a step in the right direction.
I’ve had some small successes here and there, but I’m finding it funny and sad that I am unable to successfully share the one best learning tool in my personal arsenal with the students that I work with.
I could bemoan that the problem isn’t with me, or with my methods, it’s with the community/school/students/parents/etc. But what good does that do? Such excuses would make me feel better, but they wouldn’t be me teaching — they’d be me giving up. As I step back from day to day writing instruction while my very able student teacher steps up, I’m thinking again about how to teach blogging rather than writing with blogs.
For two different quarters in two different school years, I have been attempting to better incorporate blogging into my speech course, English 10B, a standard course for students in the tenth grade in my district. I figured then, and still think now, that using a blog as both a research log as well as a tool for reflection while preparing for a speech was a good idea. To that end, I encouraged students to write three kinds of posts. I’ll admit that we all got a little stuck as we learned how to navigate between our own blogs and the blogs of our classmates. We used Bloglines as our aggregator and Blogger as our blogging tool. Too much software. Elgg has mostly solved that problem, as it serves as both blog and aggregator. Too cool.
While I was pleased that my students began to tentatively share their ideas with the world, I felt that my instruction was not as thorough as it might have been. I understood that one of the powers of blogging is the ability to connect to the writing of others in some pretty tangible ways. But I don’t know that I communicated that to my students as successfully as I would have liked.
This isn’t a post about tools. It’s a post about content. But the tools and the content are beginning to, or have always been, running together and affecting the other. My students, or me, or you, or anyone can’t learn how to write connectively without first learning how to make those connections. I’m not an expert, but I think it makes sense to try to articulate the different types of links that are possible in a blog post. I recognize that such a list is limiting, but I need to wrap my brain around these ideas a little bit. (Here’s a wiki version of my list, which is by no means complete. Feel free to make it better.) I see several different types of linking that I should be explicitly teaching:
1. Connecting to locations. The simplest of links. When we write, we might write about specific places, people or events. Often, those events or places have websites. A very basic form of connective writing, then, would include creating links to those places. (Ex. I like the Denver Broncos; Bob Ross was a great artist.)
2. Connecting to ideas. This is a basic citation. Alan Levine calls it a linktribution. One of my pet peeves about teaching blogging and hyperlinking is that so often, people will link to the parent page of a website rather than the page where they got their specific information. The best part about linking to specific information is that it’s very transparent. I can trust you as a writer right away if I can see that your links are accurate and that the quotes that you use are reproduced accurately.
3. Connecting to self. Sometimes the best ideas that we can find are ones that we had in the past. The advantage to keeping and archiving a blog is that you can almost literally travel back in time to visit with the old you. One way to connect with the old you is to quote yourself and respond.
4. Connecting for attention. When students are writing for specific audiences, they sometimes need to get the attention of the folks that they are writing for. One way to do so in an online environment is to include a link to a site or blog or wiki or something that their intended audience might be keeping an eye on. When the audience searches for references to the link the writer uses, then that writer will discover the piece of writing. Most bloggers that I know are aware of this, and they maintain an RSS feed (or several) of searches for specific links or terms that relate to them. For example, I use Technorati to provide me with an RSS feed of any reference to the URL of this blog. When someone writes about, and links back to, something that’s been posted on my blog, I find out about it and can go check it out.
This is certainly first draft thinking; please keep that in mind. How are you teaching your students to link? What have I missed? Is there a better list out there? Again, here’s the link to the wiki version of this list — help me improve it. I’m eager for some feedback, as well as conversation, about how to teach blogging and not writing with blogs.
I have a hunch that 8e6 Technologies, the group that filters our school area’s Internet, recently decided that Google Video is "R Rated." I noticed that the site became blocked here a few days ago. YouTube has been blocked, for the same reason, for a while.
Dear 8e6, please remove those sites from "R Rated." We use Google Video to host our video work for OldeSchoolNews.com. In my experience, their content is community policed for decency. The same can’t be said for the stuff that isn’t being blocked.
Ben provides a far better rationale than I do. I simply contend that no one thought much about it when they hit the filter switch. And that’s unacceptable. That switch should only be pulled as a last resort, not as a first line of defense.
UPDATE (2/21/07): I didn’t do a good job of making my point in the post above, so I’ll try again. The reason I’m mentioning the block of Google Video is because it appears to me that someone in a private company somewhere made a decision about the value (or lack thereof) of a particular website. Then, that individual, without consultation with or consideration of, schools that (are required by federal law to) use their product (or another one like it), applied the filter to that website.
That’s too simple. It should take more thought and effort and discussion to turn off a piece of the Internet in a public school in the United States of America. It should be hard.
But it isn’t, and that’s sad.
I am not against the careful use of filters. Some stuff has no business at school. But we should be erring on the side of too open, not too closed.
I never thought I’d say/write this, but I’m finding that I need a way to create footnotes in a blog entry. I use Typepad. Does anyone know of how/where I can create footnotes, preferably linkable ones, inside of my blog?
I’m writing a big post, and I need the ability to annotate it. Suggestions?
I’m discovering more and more connections to the National Writing Project within my online networks. I wonder if someone has (or could) create a badge for folks who are NWP teachers. I have a hunch that there are lots of writing project teachers blogging. Wouldn’t it be handy if we had a list of all of us somewhere? (I created a list of NWP site blogs a while back on the wiki — is your NWP site blog listed there?)
Just in case you were wondering — this isn’t me.
