Monthly Archives: July 2009

Reading Social Networks

Posted on by
9

I’m doing some work next month with some folks on social networking, and one of the elements that I’m thinking a great deal about, thanks to a colleague‘s suggestion, is how we can help educators to read social networks as texts.

I have a hunch that one can read a network like one reads any other text.  That said, though, I’m finding that it’s a bit harder to see a network than it is to see a simpler, perhaps more linear text.

Specifically, I’m trying to design an activity that encourages some rhetorical analysis of the networks that educators and others are using to share information.

In layman’s terms, I’m hoping to generate a list of questions that folks can use as they read through networks to help them identify what the networks are communicating, how they’re communicating what they’re communicating, and how those messages are delivered.

I’m wondering what questions you would ask readers/participants to think about or look for as they work their way through a particular network or networks.  What do you think we should be helping our students to think about as they read and create their own networks?  I’d also be curious to hear your response to this general idea.  I’m discovering that as I try to draft questions, I find myself using language about networks that I think is better used to describe group or community characteristics.  Worth doing?

Here are a couple of questions that I think are pretty important – I’d be really curious to hear yours in the comments:

1.  Who are the nodes in the network that you are reading/analyzing?  Where do you see boundaries of membership in this network?  How do you know they exist? (Self-identified or apparent to readers?)

2. How are they connected?  From what perspective are you reading the network – how are you seeing the connections? How might another reader see those connections?  The same?  Differently?  How do you know?

3.  What practices or beliefs are communicated through the network?   Are these explicit?  Implicit?  What methods of communication are privileged in the network? Under or unvalued?  How do you know?

Google+EvernoteEmailWordPressRead It LaterInstapaperShare

Seven Things I Might Not Otherwise Write Here

Posted on by
6

It was a dark and stormy night the last time I played this little game, the one where I tell you things that you might not expect about me because I’ve been asked to by fellow bloggers.  And it was quite some months ago that Michelle tagged me in this little game, one I usually don’t play.   But she’s become a trusted collaborator over the past several months, and I’m pleased to share that she will become a local colleague tomorrow when she begins working in district as our new instructional technologist.  Our district will benefit from her presence and work.  I know I sure will.  That said, I suppose it’s time to share the seven things.

Here goes.

1.  I’ve now lived more than half of my life in Colorado, but still consider myself a Southerner.  It’s true.  I moved from North Carolina when I was 12 and turned 31 last week.

2. I’m a Boettcher Scholar, which means pretty much nothing to those of you who don’t live in Colorado, but it was, and continues to be, a big deal for me. I still pinch myself on that one some times.

3. I sometimes don’t read the last few pages of exceptionally good books.  I reckon that’s as much about not being finished with them and always haveing just a few pages left.  Sometimes, I eventually finish them.  Other times, not.

4.  I used to carry one of these with me pretty much wherever I went.  It had the desired effect of bringing a smile to anyone I shared it with.

5.  The only reason I’ve read any of Moby Dick at all is that I was once staying in a hostel in Germany where there were only two books available to me in English.  One was Moby Dick.  The other was Message in a Bottle.  After ten pages, I took Message in a Bottle back and picked up Moby Dick.  I’m glad that I did – although I’ve not yet finished it.  That was ten years ago.

6.  When my wife is out of town, I feed the children fish.  She can’t stand anything from the water.

7.  I really, really, really, and I mean completely seriously and in a profound way, don’t like telephones.  Ironically, or unfortunately, I carry two of them.
So ends the disclosures.  Welcome, Michelle.  I’m glad you’re here.

Google+EvernoteEmailWordPressRead It LaterInstapaperShare

The Podcast: EtherPad & Collaborative Writing

Posted on by
7

In today’s podcast, I talk about a little collaborative writing experiment that I began last week, what I think worked, what perhaps didn’t, and share some of my thinking about why such things might be important.  Certainly a first draft thinking podcast.  Here’s the original EtherPad document, still available for editing and revision, as well as a PDF copy of the text as it exists at the time of this post.  I’d be curious as to your thinking about the value of tools like these and how we might use them to create and converse.  I like that Stephen expands the idea of writing as creation very much.  He’s right, of course.

Direct Link to Audio

EtherPad & Collaborative Writing – An Experiment

Google+EvernoteEmailWordPressRead It LaterInstapaperShare

Teagan’s Blue Crayon

Posted on by
9


Teagan’s Blue Crayon

Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

Note – This post was mostly composed months ago; it’s almost a year old. I’m posting it now because I’m in the middle of revisiting lots of drafts of posts. This one seemed done. Not sure why I never published it. – Bud

____

Setting the scene: It’s just after dinner tonight, and I am in our play room, a converted office full of kids’ toys, assorted vehicles, and a large table stocked full of art supplies. Teagan’s there, too. In fact, she’s the reason I’m there. She discovered four discarded crayons, a leftover project of Ani’s, under the table. She’s only fourteen months old, but she’s been watching Ani, so she knows what those crayons can do.

She carefully lowers herself to the floor, leaning over to a collection of index cards and Curious George notepad pages, another discarded project. (Man, we really need to clean the play room.) She makes a tentative scribble on an index card, exploring the jagged red line she’s producing, her tongue hanging slightly out of her mouth with the effort. A smile and perhaps a bit of toddler drool appears on her lips as she continues to mark, alternating the crayons in her right hand, pressing each onto the card. I watch her watching herself discovering the way that crayons allow her to make marks on paper, the secret excitement only one fellow writer has for another building in my head and heart. Discovering the act of creation is, at any age, a big deal.

Her favorite, she decides between exchanges and random markings on the card, is the blue crayon, and I am able to sneak the others out of sight and mind before she decides to do any furniture or wall scribbling.

But the blue crayon must stay in her hand. The index card, too.

I tell her it’s time for bed and stand up to leave the room. She rises, too, clutching the blue crayon in one hand, the index card in the other. I watch her waddle her toddler waddle to the stairs and realize that she’s taking her tools with her to bed. And up the stairs, which she’s only beginning to climb on her own. I manage to get her to leave the card with me, motioning to her that she can have the card at the top of the stairs. But the blue crayon stays in her hand for the long climb, me one step behind, as she slowly ascends, reaching out the entire time for the card that I’m waving a few inches past her reach.

Her card returned, we begin the bed time ritual. I try to take her tools away to put on her PJs – but she will have none of that, shrill cries telling me just what she thinks of my idea. Until she realizes that I cannot remove her shirt unless she puts them down. Still, she cries and cries as I remove her clothes and change a diaper, only ceasing when, fresh and clean and pajama-ed, I return her crayon and index card to her still waiting fingers.

A few minutes later, she’s ready for sleep, and I place the card and crayon on her dresser. We say night night to them before going to bed.

Google+EvernoteEmailWordPressRead It LaterInstapaperShare